Customer Behavior, Emotional Labour, and Employee’s Emotional Outcome in Hotel Industry in Thai Nguyen Province (2)

Hypotheses H1: Customer injustice behavior will lead to anger feeling in employees H2: Anger feeling will cause employees to engage in cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate their

CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR, EMOTIONAL LABOUR AND EMPLOYEE’S EMOTIONAL OUTCOME IN HOTEL INDUSTRY

IN THAI NGUYEN PROVINCE

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

CENTRAL PHILIPPINE UNIVERSITY

DOCTOR IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

MAI VIET ANH

DECEMBER 2016

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Title: Customer Behavior, Emotional Labour, and Employee’s

Emotional Outcome in Hotel Industry in Thai Nguyen Province

Total No of Page: 107

Researcher: Mai Viet Anh

Degree Program: Doctor of Management

Institution: Central Philipine University

Jaro, Iloilo City

Region VI

Background and Rationale of the Study

One of the typical characteristics of services is that customer and employee may together affect the service quality Each customer with his/her different needs and wants may evaluate the service quality differently The interaction between employee and customer also affects service quality and customer satisfaction Because service quality depend on employee’s feelings when they provide service, employees’ emotions in service encounter are very important to service transactions

In Thai Nguyen province, many service firms face with difficulty that sometimes employees have to deal with unpleasant customers and they easily get angry In some cases, employees do not show their suitable emotional expression that cause customers dissatisfied with services and switch to other providers In some situations, employees’ negative emotions cause by customer behaviors However, employees do not control their emotional and react in impolite way may cause situation worse Many service firms in Thai Nguyen province do not pay attention to this problem These situations seem to be true with several hotels in Thai Nguyen Because of unsuitable emotional expression in some situation, employees may make customers feel dissatisfied with services Understanding deeply the mechanism of emotional regulation and its outcomes may help hotels increase customer satisfaction and retention

Research Questions

- Customer injustice behaviors have impact on employee’s emotions or not?

- What is the effect of employee’ emotions on their emotional labor or emotional regulation?

- What is the effect of emotion regulation on employee’s emotional outcomes?

Objectives

employee’s emotion in service process

outcomes such as emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction

Hypotheses

H1: Customer injustice behavior will lead to anger feeling in employees

H2: Anger feeling will cause employees to engage in cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate their emotions

H3: Anger feeling will cause employees to engage in emotion suppression strategy to regulate their emotions

H4: Employees who engage more in cognitive reappraisal strategy will more satisfy with the job

H5: Employees who engage more in cognitive reappraisal strategy will less become exhaust

H6: Employees who engage more on suppression strategy will become exhaust H7: Employees who engage more on suppression strategy will less satisfy with the

job

Customer’s

Injustice

Behavior

Employee’s Anger Felt

Cognitive Reappraisal

Emotion Suppression

Job Satisfaction

Emotional Exhaustion

Significance of the Study

By conducting this research, managers at Hotels in Thai Nguyen can understands the mechanism of emotional regulation in employees, understand the role

of emotional regulation in service process By training employees with emotional regulation skill, hotels can avoid some situations in which employees show their unsuitable emotions with customers, increase customer satisfaction and retention

Research Design

A common service scenario will be designed that would provoke emotional responses in employees Participants will be surveyed in groups of around 30-50 people They will be asked to engage in a role-playing exercise that they imagine they experience the situations in which they are treated with injustice behaviors The particular procedure will be as followings:

Population, Sample Size, Sampling Techniques

Population

The target population of this study will be employees who work in Hotel Industry in Thai Nguyen province

Sampling Technique

The sample size will be 385

In this study, twenty (20) hotels with over 30 employees for each will be chosen

to take the survey

Research Instruments

Four items (7-point scale) used for measure employees’ emotions (anger) after being treated unfairly will be adapted from Bougie et al (2003) and Weiss (1999) Angry feelings will be assessed with four items (7-point scale): angry, enraged, frustrated, and irritated Scores on these four items will be summed to form an anger experience composite, which is the score used in analyses Two items adapted from Rupp et al (2008) and two others from Colquitt (2001) will be used to measure employee perception of customers’ interactional injustice (7-point scale) Five items for measuring cognitive reappraisal and three items for measuring emotion suppression (7-point scale) will be adapted from Gross and John (2003) and Gabbott (2010) In

order to measure job satisfaction, this study uses four items adapted from Schwepker (2001) Table 1 indicates all items and constructs used in this study Seven items will

be used to measure employee exhaustion adapted from Maslach, et al., 1996

Data Gathering Procedures

First, the scenario and questionnaires will be prepared And then, these two instruments will be validated by some researchers in Thai Nguyen University of Economics and Business Administration After revising the questionnaires from researchers, the revised questionnaires will be used in pilot test From the results of pilot test, the questionnaire and scenario will be corrected and modified before taking the official survey The questionaire before using for survey was translated into Vietnamese and then the Vietnamese version was translated into English independently

Date Processing and Data Analysis

The data after collection will be analyzed through following procedures:

Descriptive Statistic Methods

Descriptive analysis to eliminate some errors of scales by comparing mean, distribution plot, maximum and minimum values The data will be checked for data input errors

Purification Process

The data after taking some descriptive methods will be purified by some methods:

Exploratory Factor Analysis

Scale Reliability Testing

The scales will be checked through reliability analysis to assure the convergent and reliability Cronbach’s Alpha will be used to test the reliability of scale This coefficient allows assessing the consistency of scale that represent for the variable In this study, the reliability of scale through Cronbach Alpha must be greater than 0.7 with sample size of 300 The Item-total Correlation must be greater than 0.4

Preliminary Analysis

In an experimental–designed study, validity of the scenario-based approach is very important Two issues should be concerned with a role-playing based study are realism of scenario and easiness of role-playing When the experimental designed study lacks either of the two, the interpretation of the results may become problematic The results showed that the scenario was shown to be a realistic and easy situation for the subjects to imagine themselves as employees in

Scale Purifications

In this section, the processes for assessment of measurement quality are presented Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to examine a factor loading and item-total correlation of an indicator for each of seven constructs in the hypothesized model Then, the reliability of each construct was investigated Some items have factor loading values less than 0.4 or high cross-correlation with other indicators, or low item-total correlations were deleted If the construct shows low level of reliability with Cronbach Alpha less than 0.6, it was also deleted The results of exploratory factor analysis for each construct were as followings

Hypothesis Testing

Hypothesis 1 This hypothesis is that customer injustice behavior will lead to

anger feeling in employees The confirmatory factor analysis showed that perception

of customer injustice behavior has a positive effect on anger felt in employee with

β=.72 (p < 01) The hypothesis 1 was supported

Hypothesis 2 This hypothesis is that Anger feeling will cause employees to

engage in cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate their emotions The confirmatory factor analysis showed that after experience anger felt, employees engage more on

cognitive reappraisal β=.41 (p < 01) The hypothesis 2 was supported

Hypothesis 3 The results from confirmatory factor analysis show that the

hypothesis H3 is supported It means that employees who feel angry with customer injustice behavior engage more on emotional suppression (β=.58, p<.01)

Hypothesis 4: This hypothesis stated that employees who engage more in

cognitive reappraisal strategy will feel more satisfied with the job The results from confirmatory factor analysis support this hypothesis (β=.39, p<.001)

Hypothesis 5 The data analysis showed that employees who engage more on

suppression strategy will less satisfy with the job This hypothesis was not supported

with t-value of 1.411 and p-value of 0.159

Hypothesis 6: The data analysis also supported this hypothesis It means that

employees who engage more on suppression strategy will become more exhaust The results from confirmatory factor analysis support this hypothesis with (β=.19, p<.001)

Hypothesis H7: This hypothesis stated that employees who engage more in

cognitive reappraisal strategy will more become exhaust The results from data analysis show that cognitive reappraisal has positive effect on emotional exhaust with (β=.18, p<.001)

Table 4.12 Summary of Hypothesis-Testing Results

H1: Customer injustice behavior will lead to anger feeling in

employees

Supported

H2: Anger feeling will cause employees to engage in

cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate their emotions

Supported

H3: Anger feeling will cause employees to engage in emotion

suppression strategy to regulate their emotions

Supported

H4: Employees who engage more in cognitive reappraisal

strategy will more satisfy with the job

Supported

H5: Employees who engage more on suppression strategy

will less satisfy with the job

Not supported

H6: Employees who engage more on suppression strategy

will become exhaust

Supported

H7: Employees who engage more in cognitive reappraisal

strategy will become exhaust

Supported

Confirmatory Factor Analysis Results

Findings

The objective of this study is to identify the relationship between the independent variable which is the customer injustice, employee anger felt, employee emotional regulation and the outcomes Emotional regulation consists of two strategy cognitive appraisal and emotional suppression with the dependent variable which is the outcomes that consists of job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion The result of each hypothesis will be compared with the previous research or literature to confirm whether this research result is accepted with other researcher literature

This study addressed an important issue that has received much attention in the research literature: the interaction between customer and employee in service Although previous research studied the effect of managerial factors affecting employee’s mood and emotions, the current study went further by identifying the effect of customer injustice behavior on employee’s emotions emotional outcomes This research also clarified the concept “emotion regulation” and analyzed the effect

of emotion regulation on employee’s outcomes By analyzing the effect of customer injustice behavior on employee ‘s emotions and outcomes, this study interpreted the phenomenon employees get into stress when they interact with customers

The results show that customer injustice behavior will lead to anger feelings in employees When employees were treated unfairly by customers, it is easy for them to get angry As predicted, in cases of more customer injustice, employees engaged in higher levels of anger felt In the service industry, customers are indeed an important source of injustice in the workplace Our results therefore serve to extend the multifoci

Surface-Acting (Suppressio n)

Exhaustion

Job satisfaction

Deep-acting (Reapprais al)

Customer

Injustice

Behavior

Employe

e Anger Felt .73

.39

.48

.19

.18*

.39

.16

model of organizational justice (Cropanzano et al., 2001), making the case for customers a source of injustice The research in human resource management focused

on study the feelings of employees with organizational factors Employees may feel angry with their bosses or their coworkers Not much research focus on customers as a source of anger felt Customers with injustice behaviors may make employees feel angry

The findings from data analysis also show that when employees suffer from anger felt, they will use suitable strategies to cope with anger felt Because of organizational rules, employees try to control their emotions during service process

As above discussion, emotion regulation refers to the processes by which people manage their emotions to response to the stimuli and seek to redirect the spontaneous flow of their emotions This process consists of two sub-processes Employees in service firms also experience from this process Four of these are involved in deep acting process and response modulation involves surface acting To deal with negative emotions, employees must adopt some coping strategies In this case, they apply cognitive reappraisal strategy

When employees suffer from being treated unfairly by customers, they intend to behave naturally in ways that help them to release the stress However, in service process, they cannot show their anger expression because of company’s rules Even though they are really angry, they try to suppress their anger to achieve customer satisfaction The results from data analysis support this hypothesis This hypothesis consistent with following studies:

Morris and Feldman (1996) predicted that when the emotional response desired was positive, positive affectivity would reduce the amount of emotional dissonance present Others have proposed that negative affectivity, on the other hand would increase the amount of emotional dissonance in that situation (Abraham, 1998) Given that emotional dissonance is a direct result of surface acting, these predictions essentially assert that positive affectivity will reduce the need or frequency of surface acting, and negative affectivity will increase the frequency of surface acting Emotional suppression can be considered as surface acting in employees

The relationship between cognitive strategies and job satisfaction shows positive results The results analyzed in the chapter 4 shows that there is a positive relationship between cognitive reappraisal and job satisfaction The relationship between these two variables is significantly with strong relationship As we know that cognitive reappraisal is process of regulating emotion for intentional purpose However, this process can help employees reduce the effect of emotional events on their emotional state Therefore, they seem to feel more satisfied with job when adopting this strategy

Emotional exhaustion occurs when the emotional demand exceed what an individual is able to afford during interpersonal interaction at work (Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, 2001) When an individual chronically works under stress that is induced by interpersonal interaction, emotional exhaustion can further result in emotional over tension Because of the stress raising during service process and cause

by unfair treatment of customers, employees seem to be exhausted and they seem to less satisfied with their job

The regulation of emotion can help employee to display positive emotion According to Diefendorff and Gosserand (2003), employees involve in emotional labor to influence the emotions of others so that work goals can be achieved This study adds to the growing literature on to sightsee the relationship of emotional suppression and the outcomes

Emotional labor can result in emotional exhaustion in long term For example, the relationship between employee emotional labor and emotion exhaustion Emotional labor in overall stated a positive correlation with emotion exhaustion The means that when emotional labor is strongest, the high the emotion exhaustion (Kruml

& Geddes, 2000) Previous studies show that the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction can be mutual since job satisfaction is believed to influence employee performance (Hallowell et al., 2003) Thus, emotional labor, an employee performance indicator, can also be expected to be influenced by job satisfaction The other previous research suggests a direct relationship between emotional labor and emotion exhaustion For example, according to Hochchild (1983) display emotion that