Abstract
Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this article integrates service literature on value cocreation with the psychological literature on emotional labor. Highlighting the co-production of services by both customers and employees, this research applies emotional labor theory to customers’ emotion regulation and expression. We explore the argument that customers perceive emotional display rules in service establishments and engage in goaldirected emotion regulation (i.e., customer emotional labor; CEL), using qualitative (Study 1) and quantitative (Study 2) methodologies. Descriptive findings from Study 1 provide evidence for the existence of CEL. Study 2 assesses the psychometric soundness of a newly developed customer display rules scale, and quantitatively tests a conceptual framework by examining antecedents and outcomes of customer emotion regulation. Findings of each study, the implications of this work, and avenues for future service management research are addressed.
Highlights
Emerging theoretical work in service management views customers as playing an integral role in co-producing services and co-creating value within service ecosystems (Lusch and Vargo 2006)
Our findings suggested that customers utilize different emotional labor strategies and that, generally, customers may have a wider range of emotion regulation strategies available to them compared to employees (e.g., “situation selection”, leaving a situation; Gross 1998)
We hypothesize that: H1: Customer emotional display rules will be associated with customer emotion regulation across service failure and service success situations
Summary
Emerging theoretical work in service management views customers as playing an integral role in co-producing services (i.e., providing information, directions, feedback; performing a significant portion of the work) and co-creating value within service ecosystems (Lusch and Vargo 2006). Co-production describes the interactive, dyadic process occurring between customers and employees in service interactions through which the resources of all stakeholders are integrated to shape the service experience (Vargo and Lusch 2004) This idea is consistent with the notion of ‘customers as partial employees’ which obliges organizations to clearly define customer roles to enable more effective service encounters (Mills and Morris 1986). The characteristics of the space such as ambient conditions, signs and symbols – referred to as the servicescape (Bitner 1992) – can influence customers’ psychological responses and overt behaviors (approach, avoidance, interactions).
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