You are invited to our December Interdisciplinary Creativity Brown Bag
Fostering Employee Service Creativity: Joint Effects of Customer Empowering Behaviors and Supervisory Empowering Leadership
Yuntao Dong
School of Business
Thursday, December 11th 2014, 12 – 1 pm
School of Business Boardroom, Room 302
Abstract:
The contemporary literature on customer influence on service process posits that customers can provide critical inputs to help improve the service they receive because they may have the precise information and first-hand experiences with the service. However, the literature offers no theoretical or empirical answers to the question of how customers might encourage employee creativity without having to contribute specific knowledge or expertise. Integrating insights from the literature on customers’ central role in service and the literature on employee creativity, we offer theoretical and empirical account of how and when customer empowering behaviors can motivate employee creativity during service encounters and, subsequently, influence customer satisfaction with service experience. Using multilevel, multi-source, experience sampling data from 380 hairstylists matched with 3550 customers in 118 hair salons, we found that customer empowering behaviors were positively related to employee creativity and subsequent customer satisfaction via employee state promotion focus. Results also showed that empowering behaviors from different agents function synergistically in shaping employee creativity: supervisory empowering leadership strengthened the indirect effect of customer empowering behaviors on employee creativity via state promotion focus.
Please, forward this invitation to your colleagues who may be interested in creativity!
For more information, contact: Nora Madjar at nora.madjar@business.uconn.edu