Impact of Employee Gender and Job Congruency on Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Selecting the best employees for customer contact jobs is critically important for customer satisfaction and, ultimately, an organization's success. One potential influence on satisfaction is the congruency between the characteristics of the employee and customer expectations. This research examines how customers respond to employees who are not of the typical, or expected, gender in gender‐typed jobs. Two experiments were conducted that used scenarios of service encounters to manipulate employee gender and gender dominance of the occupation in between‐subjects designs. The dependent variables were level of satisfaction with the service encounter (Experiment 1) and employee evaluation (Experiment 2). The results generally showed that respondents evaluated employees more positively when they performed congruent rather than incongruent jobs. In addition, gender and trait characteristics of the respondents influenced the way employee gender affected evaluations. The preference for congruent employees was strongest among male respondents and cross‐sex‐typed respondents. A different type of congruency was also found. That is, some respondents evaluated employees more positively if they were the same rather than the opposite gender as themselves. This effect was strongest for female and for gender‐aschematic respondents.