Front-Line Employee Deviance, Encounter Satisfaction, and Customer Citizenship Behavior: An Experimental Design

Abstract

While to date, the phenomena of employee deviance and customer citizenship behavior have overwhelmingly been studied in an isolated and disparate fashion. This empirical effort lays the ground for exploring the impact of employees’ deviant behavior under different conditions on repurchase intention, customer citizenship behavior (CCB) towards the company, and encounter satisfaction during a specific service incident. Understanding the impact of employee deviance on customers’ experience during the service encounter remains crucial as the costs of deviant behavior to the organization primarily impair service quality and possibly discourage customers from repeat business (Harris and Ogbonna 2012). Most relevant studies mainly focus on negative aspects of employee deviance, ignoring the existence of customer-oriented deviant behaviors which can positively affect customer experience during the service specific transaction (Stock and Bednarek 2014). Despite the focus on some organizational and individual determinants of deviant employee behavior such as job control or need for social approval (Brady et al. 2012), the extant research rarely acknowledges how various types of deviant employee activity affect customer perception of the FE or the organization (Daunt and Harris 2013). Equally important, the role of employee deviance during the service encounter for customer citizenship (or dysfunctional) behavior has never been considered, despite calls to identify the organizational-based determinants of customer deviant behavior (Boo et al. 2013; Gong et al. 2013).