The spillover effects of management influence tactics on customer-directed outcomes

Abstract

Following the development of the service-profit chain (Heskett, Jones, Loveman, Sasser, & Schlesinger, 1994), there has been enthusiasm to empirically investigate inside-organizational activities in the context of marketing. Riding this trend, the present study examines how various management influence tactics focused on employees interact to affect customer-directed noncompliance through the intervening mechanism of employees’ job satisfaction. Based on multi-source survey design, data were collected from 873 restaurant frontline employees and 2,619 customers in China. The results support that job satisfaction fully mediated the associations between job fit (non-coercive tactics) and employee incivility (customer-directed noncompliance), and between employee orientation (soft-coercive tactics) and employee incivility. Moreover, the strength of the job satisfaction-employee incivility linkage varies depending on levels of organizational formalization (hard-coercive tactics). This study is among the first attempts to focus on the spillover effects of manager influence tactics on outside-organization outcomes.