The Influence of Customer Empowering Behaviors on Employees&#x02019; Job Crafting: A Moderated Mediation Model

Deng Xincai; Han Yue; Ye Yijiao; Guo Gongxing

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240125

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2024, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (1) : 211-219. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240125

Social, Personality & Organizational Psychology

The Influence of Customer Empowering Behaviors on Employees’ Job Crafting: A Moderated Mediation Model

Deng Xincai¹, Han Yue¹, Ye Yijiao², Guo Gongxing³

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Abstract

Increasingly fierce market competition requires organizations to continuously improve service quality to meet the diverse and fast-changing service requirements of customers. As a group directly contacting with customers, frontline service employees have unique advantages in sensing changes in customer needs and adjusting service behaviors in a timely manner to meet customer expectations. Therefore, as a positive behavior of employees to redefine their work cognition and remodel their work content, frontline employees’ job crafting has attracted increasing research attention. Existing studies on the antecedents of employees’ job crafting have mainly focused on internal organization factors (e.g., employee characteristics and leadership) and largely ignored the influence of external organizational factors (e.g., customer empowering behaviors) on employees’ job crafting.
Based on the Self-determination Theory, this study investigates the effect of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ job crafting. In light of this, this study constructs and verifies the mediating effect of harmonious work passion between customer empowering behaviors and employees’ job crafting. Furthermore, this study also verifies the boundary effect of role breadth self-efficacy in this relationship. Results based on a time-lagged data of 373 frontline service employees revealed that customer empowering behaviors have a significant positive effect on employees’ job crafting, and role breadth self-efficacy plays a positive moderating role in this process. Moreover, harmonious work passion partly mediates the relationship between customer empowering behaviors and job crafting. Role breadth self-efficacy significantly strengthens the positive effect of customer empowering behaviors on harmonious work passion as well as the indirect effect of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ job crafting via harmonious work passion.
This research contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it deepens the understanding of employees’ job crafting. By focusing on the effects of customer empowering behaviors, this study shifts the research focus on the antecedents of job crafting from internal to external organizational factors. Second, this study also broadens our understanding of the outcomes of customer empowering behaviors. It unpacks the underlying mechanism of translating customer empowering behaviors into employees’ job crafting by considering a mediator (harmonious work passion) based on self-determination theory. Third, this study contributes by investigating the role breadth self-efficacy as a new and critical boundary condition that aggravates the positive effect of customer empowering behaviors.
This research provides several important practical implications. First, service organizations should pay attention to the important role that frontline service employees have in service delivery. To be specific, organizations should encourage employees to consciously collect the external heterogeneous resources and information provided by the customer, and encourage employees to make flexible decisions in service delivery, which are important in promoting employees’ job crafting behaviors. Second, given that harmonious work passion is positively related to employees’ job crafting, enterprises should pay attention to the influence of employees' work conditions on their job crafting, especially the effect of harmonious work passion. In this regard, organizations should create a supportive environment that can stimulate employees’ harmonious work passion to help them stay in a positive mental state and remodel their behavior to meet customer needs. Third, to amplify the positive effects of customer empowering behaviors, organizations should take measures to foster employees’ role breadth self-efficacy and pay special attention to employees who have low levels of role breadth self-efficacy.

Key words

customer empowering behaviors / harmonious work passion / role breadth self-efficacy / job crafting

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Deng Xincai, Han Yue, Ye Yijiao, Guo Gongxing. The Influence of Customer Empowering Behaviors on Employees’ Job Crafting: A Moderated Mediation Model[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2024, 47(1): 211-219 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240125

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