Job definitions and service behaviour. An investigation among technical service employees

Abstract

IntroductionThe service employees' behavior in the service encounter plays a crucial role for the customer's perception of service quality. Service organizations try to control the service behavior of employees using formal guidelines, training and instructions. However, the specific actions that are performed towards the customer during the service encounter remain under the discretion of the individual service employee. Therefore, the individual's understanding of his or her own job should significantly influence the actual service performance. The aim of this paper is to propose a method to assess the customer related job definition (CRJD) of technical service employees and to demonstrate empirical evidence regarding the importance of CRJD for the customer perception of service quality.Recent research has emphasized the importance of employees' subjective perceptions of their job. Studies have provided evidence that the way employees subjectively define their job - in terms of what is part of their job or not - has a significant impact on their work behavior (e.g. Chiaburu & Byrne, 2009; Turnipseed & Wilson, 2008; Parker, 2007; Grube & Piliavin, 2000; Morrison, 1994; Callero, Howard, & Piliavin, 1987). Particularly with respect to work activities that cannot be formally enforced or controlled by supervisors, scholars expected to see significant effects of subjective job definitions. Existing studies on proactive (Parker, Wall, & Jackson, 1997), citizenship (Kamdar, McAllister, & Turban, 2006; Morrison, 1994), prosocial behavior (Callero et al., 1987) evealed the importance of idiosyncratic job definitions for the execution of these mostly discrete behaviors.In the presented studies, we apply the existing research findings on subjective job definitions to the domain of service work, specifically to the customer related behaviors of technical service employees. Though it has been widely acknowledged that the interaction between a single service employee and the customer is a key factor for successful service delivery, until now research has hardly addressed the question of how employees understand their job in this interaction. In the domain of technical service there is a rising claim that employees should expand their job definitions to adopt customer related tasks in addition to their technical core tasks (Houben & Wuestner, 2014; Gordon, 2007). However, in many technical industries (e.g. trade work, IT services) professional identities still base on technical task accomplishment rather than on service behavior (Knutzen, 2002; Lahner, 2004). It cannot be taken for granted that all employees understand tasks such as asking for feedback or integrating the customer into the service delivery process as part of their job (Di Mascio, 2010). Rather, it can be assumed that there may be a considerable variation between technical service employees regarding the perceived responsibility for customer related tasks that may be a key factor for the overall service quality of the service organization. Assessing systematically the subjective job definitions of service employees with regard to customer related tasks can be a promising way to improve overall service quality in this sector in two ways: Firstly, assessing the subjective job definition of the existing staff and reporting the results in team meetings can be powerful tool for organizational development towards a more customer oriented climate. Secondly, assessing the customer related job definition may be a useful method when selecting new employees.In this paper we propose a method to assess Customer Related Job Definitions in the technical services. After outlining the existing literature regarding the importance of subjective job definitions we illustrate the development process of an instrument for assessing Customer Related Job Definitions. Two studies aim at testing the validity of the developed measure. While the first study examines psychometric properties and convergent validity using statistical links to external criteria, the second study analyzes the criterion validity by examining the effects of the employees' job definitions on expressed service behavior using company, employee and customer data. …