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Download fileEmotional intelligence in front-line/back-office employee relationships
journal contribution
posted on 2017-02-01, 13:33 authored by T. Kearney, G. Walsh, W. Barnett, T. Gong, M. Schwabe, Kemefasu IfieKemefasu IfiePurpose—This research undertakes a simultaneous assessment of interdependence in the behaviours of front-line and back-office employees and their joint effect on customer-related organizational performance. It also tests for a moderating influence of the emotional intelligence of front-line salespeople and back-office employees.
Design/methodology/approach—The sample comprises 105 front-line sales employees and
77 back-office employees. The customer-related organizational performance data come from a U.K. business-to-business (B2B) electronics company. With these triadic data, this study uses partial least squares to estimate the measurement and structural models.
Findings—Salespeople’s customer orientation directly affects customer-related
organizational performance; the relationship is moderated by salespeople’s emotional
intelligence. The emotional intelligence of salespeople also directly affects the customer directed citizenship behaviour of back-office employees. Furthermore, the emotional intelligence of back-office staff moderates the link between the emotional intelligence of salespeople and back-office staff citizenship behaviour. Back-office staff citizenship behaviour in turn affects customer-related organizational performance.
Originality/value—The emotions deployed by employees in interactions with customers
clearly shape customers’ perceptions of service quality, as well as employee-level
performance outcomes. But prior literature lacks insights into the simultaneous effects of front-line and back-office employee behaviour, especially in B2B settings. This article addresses these research gaps by investigating triadic relationships—among back-office employees, front-line employees and customer outcomes—in a B2B setting, where they are of particular managerial interest.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Journal of Services MarketingCitation
KEARNEY, T. ...et al., 2017. Emotional intelligence in front-line/back-office employee relationships. Journal of Services Marketing, 31 (2), pp 161-171.Publisher
© EmeraldVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-01-03Publication date
2017ISSN
0887-6045Publisher version
Language
- en