The effects of temperature on service employees' customer orientation: an experimental approach

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated how temperature can affect perceptual, cognitive and psychomotor performance (e.g. Hancock, P.A., Ross, J., and Szalma, J., 2007. A meta-analysis of performance response under thermal stressors. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 49 (5), 851–877). We extend this research to interpersonal aspects of performance, namely service employees' and salespeople's customer orientation. We combine ergonomics with recent research on social cognition linking physical with interpersonal warmth/coldness. In Experiment 1, a scenario study in the lab, we demonstrate that student participants in rooms with a low temperature showed more customer-oriented behaviour and gave higher customer discounts than participants in rooms with a high temperature – even in zones of thermal comfort. In Experiment 2, we show the existence of alternative possibilities to evoke positive temperature effects on customer orientation in a sample of 126 service and sales employees using a semantic priming procedure. Overall, our results confirm the existence of temperature effects on customer orientation. Furthermore, important implications for services, retail and other settings of interpersonal interactions are discussed.

Practitioner Summary: Temperature effects on performance have emerged as a vital research topic. Owing to services' increasing economic importance, we transferred this research to the construct of customer orientation, focusing on performance in service and retail settings. The demonstrated temperature effects are transferable to services, retail and other settings of interpersonal interactions.

Keywords:

• temperature
• customer orientation
• interpersonal performance
• helping behaviour

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jürgen Sauer for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and Simone Tintle, Marlen Placzek, Claudia Schmidt, Monique Nagel, Antje Gibson and Susanne Urlaub for their help in collecting the data. Moreover, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments helping to improve the manuscript. This research was conducted within the interdisciplinary research project ‘People Inside’ supported by Chemnitz University of Technology and the University of Stuttgart.