Your thanks make me work harder: A multiple identification perspective

Abstract

Customers interact directly with service employees and influence their attitudes and behaviors, but the extant research mainly focuses on receipt of coworker or leader gratitude (i.e., intra-organization sourced gratitude), with little attention on receipt of customer gratitude (i.e., extra-organization sourced gratitude). Integrating emotions as social information theory with a social identity approach, this research aims to address this issue by exploring why and when receipt of customer gratitude contributes to employees’ work effort. Through a field study and an experiment, we found that: (1) receipt of customer gratitude promotes employees’ occupational and organizational identification, both of which in turn lead to increased work effort; (2) employees’ other-orientation can enhance the positive relationships between receipt of customer gratitude and occupational and organizational identification; and (3) employees’ other-orientation strengthens the positive relationship between receipt of customer gratitude and employees’ work effort through both occupational and organizational identification. These findings have notable implications for research and practice.