A few feet to failure: Two essays on enhancing the service experience through customer contact employee performance

The importance of the customer contact employee in providing a successful service experience and ultimately generating customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is unequivocal. Even with research regarding the improvement of customer contact employee performance, managers still struggle with achieving the desired level of performance from their customer contact employees. This dissertation addresses the managerial concern of customer contact employee performance through two essays. Essay 1 uses 308 customer observations nested within 184 customer contact employees and 157 customer contact employee responses nested within 88 managers to examine the key antecedents and consequences of customer contact employee in-role and extra-role performance. Essay 2 uses 1000 daily observations nested within 100 customer contact employees to examine the consequences of customer interpersonal injustice on the emotions, attitudes, and counterproductive work behaviors of customer contact employees.;The results from Essay 1 show that while formal marketing controls have no effect on customer contact employee performance, informal marketing controls do increase customer contact employee performance and the manager has an influence on the development of informal controls within an employee. The results from Essay 2 show that interpersonally unjust treatment from customers results in the emotions of anger and guilt within customer contact employees and these two negative emotions reduce job satisfaction and increase counterproductive work behaviors directed at various targets. The results from Essay 2 also show that job satisfaction is negatively related to counterproductive work behaviors directed at various targets and the customer orientation of the customer contact employee increases feelings of guilt following customer interpersonal injustice. Furthermore, the implications for researchers and practitioners offered by the results of both essays are identified and discussed.