Group emotional labor and group emotional deviance, service climate, and customer satisfaction

Abstract

Research on how organizations may improve service delivery and consequently attract and retain an increasingly diverse customer audience stands to benefit not only private service firms but also provide advantages for a number of services-dependent economies. However, a lack of integration of the literatures that explore the organization-customer interface impedes scholars and managers’ understanding of how to influence salespeople behavior in order to achieve valued organizational outcomes. Thus, in an attempt to inform current theory and practice on services management, I draw mainly from theory on emotional labor, service climate, and customer satisfaction to provide a more complete view of how salespeople emotion regulation and emotional deviance, and the organization’s practices and service climate shape customer satisfaction. I discuss and examine the following: the compositional effects of emotional labor and emotional deviance and the influence of their group-level manifestations on customer satis...