Contributing to well-being: customer citizenship behaviors directed to service personnel

Abstract

The well-being of service personnel is an important issue to businesses given the crucial role they play as the interface between customers and the organization. Various life events and positive interaction with others contribute to an individual's level of well-being. This research focuses on helpful, discretionary behaviors of customers directed to service personnel. Open-ended elicitation procedures with hospitality and retail service personnel identified six categories of customer citizenship behaviors directed to service personnel that were perceived as helpful and not expected for successful service delivery. These were: assumed employee behavior; advocacy; consultancy; sportsmanship; social support and courtesy. Applying Social Production Function (SPF) theory our findings suggest that customer citizenship behaviors may assist service personnel to attain the instrumental goals of: comfort; stimulation; status; behavioral confirmation; and affection and thus subjective well-being.

Keywords:

• customer citizenship behavior
• service personnel
• customer extra-role behavior
• subjective well-being
• Social Production Function theory