Social Supports from Organization and Customer: An Integrated Model

초록

This study applies the job-demands resource (JD-R) model to investigate the interactive effect of job demands and job resources in predicting the development of service employee work engagement and customer-oriented attitude. This paper proposed a theoretical model that suggests that the service employee’s work engagement is the consequence of the employee’s perceived support from the organization and its customers (customer participation) and leads to a customer-oriented attitude. However, the effect of organizational support is somewhat hindered by job insecurity, demonstrating the inability of an organizationally provided job resource to overcome the job demand of job insecurity. As a type of job demand from customer’s perspective, customer crowding is suggested as a negativemoderator in the link between customer participation and work engagement. As such, this article proposes how different elements of a service employee’s work environmentinteract to ultimately influence the service employee’s customer-oriented attitude. Specifically, thecurrent research focuses on how the negative contextual elements of job insecurity and job crowding(i.e., job demands) interact with the potentially positive elements of organizational support andcustomer participation (i.e., job resources), as well as with an employee’s customer orientation, toultimately develop a customer-oriented attitude. This study concludes with some propositions for potential causal relationships among key constructsthat can be empirically tested in future research, as well as implications of the current study for bothmanagers and researchers.

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