@article{2017:hammes:service_em,
title = {Service Employees' Job Demands and Two Types of Deviance: The Moderating Role of Organizational Resources},
year = {2017},
note = {Service employees represent an important part of the service itself.
Their behaviour shapes customer outcomes and determines a service
organization’s success. However, service employees do not always
engage in organizationally desired behaviours but may also behave in a
way that deviates from the organization’s norms and rules. Employee
deviance is especially important to service marketers and managers, as
deviant employee behaviour may detrimentally affect customer-related
organizational performance. Examining the reasons why employees might
engage in such deviant behaviours is therefore highly important. In
prior studies of antecedents of employee deviance, scant research
addresses the different types of deviance or the effects of
organizational resources. Drawing on psychological contract breach
theory, the current research proposes a model that links two job
demands (mental pressure, perceived customer unfriendliness) as
antecedents of psychological contract breaches with two types of
service employee deviance (process and general workplace deviance).
Most importantly, it considers the moderating role of organizational
resources (perceived organizational support, supervisor knowledge).
The results reveal that supervisor knowledge weakens the effect of the
job demands on process deviance. The moderating effect of supervisor
knowledge on the effects of mental pressure and perceived customer
unfriendliness on general workplace deviance are non-significant
though. These results reinforce the close connection between the more
active form of process deviance and the organization. Surprisingly,
perceived organizational support strengthens the relationships between
mental pressure and perceived customer unfriendliness on process
deviance in our study. This result is counterintuitive and may point
to an interesting phenomenon: when highly supported by the
organization, employees may feel they do not ‘own’ the task
process and as a result, their responsibility for the process slips.
These findings underscore the important yet insufficiently explored
role of organizational resources in buffering the detrimental effect
of job demands, with implications for service marketing and management
research and practice.},
journal = {Marketing ZFP},
pages = {15--26},
author = {Hammes, Eva K. and Walsh, Gianfranco},
volume = {39},
number = {1}
}