Employee emotional response toward healthcare organization’s service recovery efforts and its influences on service recovery performance

Abstract

Previous studies on service recovery performance of frontline employees have focused primarily on the direct relationship with the organizational efforts for service recovery. However, based on the reformulation of attitude theory (appraisal-emotional response-behaviour), we believe that the emotional responses (work engagement and burnout) toward organizational efforts for service recovery of frontline employees mediate the relationship. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine how healthcare frontline employees show their emotional response toward the organizational efforts for service recovery and it influence on actual recovery performance. This study uses two conflicting emotional responses, burnout and work engagement, to examine how employees react toward organizational efforts, helping better understand employees’ evaluations of the efforts. Research model and hypothesis were tested using a sample of frontline employees who perform none-clinical activities in hospitals. The results showed that teamwork and empowerment have positive effects on work engagement. In addition, customer complaint management, empowerment, and teamwork influenced negatively on burnout. Lastly, work engagement and burnout showed statistically significant impact of service recovery performance of frontline employees. Among the organizational efforts for service recovery, teamwork was the most important factor in improving frontline employees’ work engagement and lessened their burnout, respectively. Interestingly, customer service training had a negative effect on burnout. Besides, by comparing our research model to two alternative models, we confirmed the validity of the research model.