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The impact of staff empowerment and communication style on customer evaluations: The special case of service failure
Author(s) -
Sparks Beverley A.,
Bradley Graham L.,
Callan Victor J.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
psychology and marketing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.035
H-Index - 116
eISSN - 1520-6793
pISSN - 0742-6046
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1520-6793(199708)14:5<475::aid-mar3>3.0.co;2-5
Subject(s) - empowerment , context (archaeology) , service quality , service (business) , customer satisfaction , psychology , style (visual arts) , quality (philosophy) , customer service , marketing , business , paleontology , philosophy , epistemology , biology , archaeology , history , political science , law
Empowering front‐line staff to deal with service failures has been proposed as a methodof recovering from service breakdown and ensuring greater customer satisfaction.However, no empirical study has investigated consumer responses to empowermentstrategies. This research investigates the effect on customer satisfactionand service quality of two employee characteristics: the degree to whichthe employee is empowered (full, limited, and none), and the employee'scommunication style (accommodative–informal andpersonal, and underaccommodative–formal and impersonal).These employee characteristics are studied within the context of servicefailures. Subjects were shown videotaped service scenarios, and askedto complete satisfaction and service quality ratings. Results revealedthat the fully empowered employee produced more customer satisfactionthan the other conditions, but only when the service provider used an accommodatingstyle of communication. Fully empowered and nonempowered employees werenot judged differently when an underaccommodating style of communicationwas adopted. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.