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Grounded in emotional dissonance and social presence theories, this study examines whether the characteristics of employee–customer interaction (frequency, routineness and duration) and emotional intelligence (EI) have an impact on emotional labor (surface acting (SA), deep acting and naturally felt emotions (NFE)) and whether the type of interaction (face to face, voice to voice and online) moderates this relationship.

A survey method was employed to collect data from employees working in hotels, customer care and e-booking services (n = 604). The model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The study showed that EI was positively linked to deep acting and NFE but negatively associated with SA. Frequency of interaction had a negative relationship with deep acting and NFE but a positive association with SA. Duration of interaction (DOI) had a positive relationship with deep acting and NFE but a negative association with NFE. Routineness of interaction had a negative relationship with deep acting and NFE but surprisingly had a negative relationship with SA. Online interaction moderated the relationship between EI and deep acting.

This pioneering study examines the relationship between EI and characteristics of employee–customer interaction with emotional labor in the Indian hospitality context. While the association between EI and emotional labor has been studied, this study is unique in substantiating the moderating effects of interaction type and is among the first to do so empirically.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the understanding of the process by which organizational routines emerge in entrepreneurial ventures. The emphasis is on the role of management and interaction in shaping shared schemata among members of the enterprise.

This paper uses a longitudinal interpretive and exploratory case study based on semi-structured interviews, archival material and naturalistic observation at a startup enterprise in China.

Focusing on the process through which shared schemata emerge to lay the foundation for routines in new firms, the authors find shared schemata emerge through a three-stage process: individual schemata emergence, partially shared schemata emergence and organizationally shared schemata emergence. Analogical transfer, strong foundational leadership and horizontal interaction among employees facilitate the development of individual schemata and their evolution into the shared schemata underlying organizational routines.

This paper contributes to the understanding of routine formation in entrepreneurial ventures by creating a framework of the stages of development of organizational routines, as well as the role management plays in each stage. This contribution fits within the emergent field of microfoundations, linking individual actions and cognition to organizational outcomes and adding to this the contribution of social interaction.

Managers in new Chinese enterprises could benefit from understanding the importance of routinization and the managerial approaches which facilitate routine formation. This will increase the likelihood of firm survival as well as the competitive strength of the firm.

To date, there has been little research on how routines arise in entrepreneurial ventures, and none on explicitly the role for management and interaction in fostering routinization.

Keeping both employees and customers highly engaged has become a critical issue for service firms, especially for high-contact and highly customized services. Therefore, it is essential to engage employees and customers during service interactions for better service outcomes. However, past research on employee and customer engagement has primarily focused on brands and organizations. Little research has concentrated on service interactions as the objects of engagement. To fill this research gap, this study aims to clarify and define service engagement behaviors (SEBs), identify various employee and customer SEBs and develop a model to investigate the relationships between these behaviors.

A theoretical framework was developed based on social contagion theory and service-dominant (S-D) logic to explore the effects of employee SEBs on customer SEBs through customer perceptions of relational energy and interaction cohesion. Dyadic survey data collected from 293 customer-employee pairs in various high-contact and highly customized service industries were examined through structural equation modeling.

Results show that employee SEBs (service role involvement, customer orientation behavior and customer empowerment behavior) positively influence relational energy and interaction cohesion, which in turn affect customer SEBs (service exploration behavior and service coordination behavior).

This study represents pioneering research to conceptualize SEBs. Different from the extant literature on engagement, SEBs capture the proactive and collaborative engagement behaviors of employees and customers in service interactions. Various employee and customer SEBs were identified and an empirical model was proposed and tested to investigate the effect of employee SEBs on customer SEBs through relational energy and interaction cohesion.

The purpose of this study is to explore how service employee choice and use of language to initiate and maintain conversation with second generation immigrant customers (SGIC) influence customer evaluation of the service encounter, and whether such employee acts may lead customers to employee switching, branch switching (i.e. switching from one to another location within the same brand) and/or brand switching (switching to another brand altogether).

A scenario-based between-subjects experiment of 4 (employee: match, adapt, bilingual, no adapt) × 2 (fast food, post office) × 2 (English, Spanish) was used to examine the SGIC response to service encounters in different contexts arising from employee choice and use of language. These scenarios were complemented with a series of measurement scales. The instruments, which were identical except in scenario sections, were administered on 788 second-generation Mexican American customers, resulting in 271 (fast food) and 265 (post office) effective responses.

In both service contexts, when employees initiated conversation that matched (English or Spanish) the customer expectations, the SGIC perceptions of interaction quality was higher as compared to other scenarios, leading to subsequent satisfaction and lower switching intentions (employee and branch). Similarly, interaction quality was higher for adapt scenarios as compared to bilingual or no adapt scenarios. Bilingual customers perceived higher interaction quality in bilingual/no-adapt scenarios when compared to monolingual customers. In both contexts, service quality and satisfaction were associated with employee switching and branch switching, but not with brand switching.

By utilizing interaction adaptation theory to conceptualize the effects of employee choice and use of language, the study grounds the model and the hypotheses in theoretical bases and provides empirical corroboration of the theory. The study also contributes toward understanding the service encounters from the perspective of an overlooked group of vulnerable customers: second-generation immigrants.

Service research cautions service providers that a key factor in attracting and retaining customers is having detailed communication guidelines and empowering employees to follow those guidelines. The findings go a step further and underscore the critical role of communication from a managerial standpoint. It is in the interest of service organizations to develop guidelines that will govern employee choice and use of language during service encounters. So doing is commercially justified because unguided employee choice and use of language can result in customer switching and attrition.

The juxtaposition between assigned versus asserted identities is an important one not only in social sciences but also within service research. As service encounters grow increasingly multicultural, the need to educate employees on multiculturally appropriate communication etiquette rises in importance. The findings should encourage service firms and local governments to develop formal communication guidelines that begin with multiculturalism as a central tenet permeating all aspects of employee–employee, employee–customer and customer–customer communications. Service providers ought to take precautionary measures to ensure customers will be empowered to assert their identities in their own terms, if they wish so.

The study demonstrates how employee choice and use of language during service encounters may thwart SGIC, who might view such employee behaviors as acts of identity assignment and, consequently, feel stigmatized, marginalized and offended; and links such customer experiences to switching behavior through mediatory mechanisms.

Many have applied the concept of congruence or fit in the context of person‐organization, person‐environment and person‐person relationships and interactions. However, despite the significance of customer‐employee interactions and relations in a services context, no research has investigated the effects of congruence between a customer's self‐concept and employee‐image on important relational outcomes such as relationship satisfaction, loyalty to employees and satisfaction towards service provider. The paper aims to fill this gap in the literature and to investigate the effects of self‐employee congruence on customer satisfaction via the mediating effects of personal interaction, relationship satisfaction and loyalty to employees. The paper also seeks to investigate the links among personal interaction, relationship satisfaction and loyalty towards employees.

The paper uses a causal modelling approach and proposes a conceptual model after an extensive review of the literature related to consumer behaviour, organizational behaviour, relationship marketing and services marketing. The paper is based on a sample of 203 customers of bank users in Nigeria who completed a self‐administered questionnaire. The paper uses confirmatory factor analysis and SEM to analyse and confirm the conceptual model proposed in this research.

The paper demonstrates that self‐employee congruence is an important antecedent of personal interaction, relationship satisfaction and loyalty to employees each of which is in turn positively linked to customer satisfaction towards the service provider.

The paper discusses implications for service marketers and for retail banking sector and highlights the significance of self‐employee congruence for service design and delivery, advertising strategies and suggests future research directions.

The paper is first of its kind to discuss the effects of perceived similarities between customers and employees on some important relational constructs such as personal interaction, relationship satisfaction, loyalty towards employees and towards customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how managerial interactions with employees affect work output, using Ghanaian organizations as a study.

The paper adopts a survey method, using questionnaires to collect data from 120 workers from four Ghanaian organizations to form the basis of the study.

It was found that regular interactions between managers and employees have a direct positive effect on employee work output. Results emerging from the analysis show that for organizations to make any significant impact on performance, both managers and their subordinates must have a very good climate of social interactions. The involvement of lower level employees in organizational activities and decision making is of crucial importance to organizational performance.

The study is limited to the four organizations of the sample and the number of respondents.

The paper's findings call for some behavioural directions for managers in organizations to pay serious attention to the total involvement of workers through effective communication in the running of the organizations.

The paper discusses organizational communication by focusing on managerial interaction with employees, and how it can affect organizational work output. The consequences of lack of effective managerial interaction with employees would result in an increased tendency for individuals to leave the organization due to a lower level of satisfaction with their managers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between customer interactivity and the value it realizes for employees and customers, that is, employee creativity and customer-perceived economic value, and to test the mediation role of knowledge exchange quality in this relationship.

A cross-sectional empirical study using pairing data collected from the employees and customers of a high-contact service industry is designed to test the research model. Customers and employees in 75 hotels in China are surveyed. Equation model analysis is performed with SPSS and Amos.

Customer interactivity has a positive effect on the employee creativity and customer-perceived economic value, and the quality of knowledge exchange mediates the two processes.

The findings provide suggestions for managers to take action to promote interactions between customers and employees and to encourage them to actively participate in the value creation process. Additionally, enterprises can establish a knowledge integration mechanism to improve the quality of knowledge exchange.

This study explores the value of interaction from the perspective of both sides of the interaction, enriching and expanding the theory of interaction. Few studies simultaneously consider the value of both parties in the interaction process. From a two-way perspective, this study extends the past unilateral angle to a multilateral perspective and clearly explains the mechanism behind continuous interaction. This study finds the key mediator variable – knowledge exchange quality – in how customer–employee interactions achieve value. It theoretically enriches the research on the interaction-value mechanism from the perspective of knowledge management.

This study aims to investigate how small talk interaction affects knowledge sharing, examining the mediating role of interpersonal trust (affect- and cognition-based trust) and the moderating role of perceived similarity among the mechanisms of small talk and knowledge sharing.

This research conducts complementary studies and collects multi-culture and multi-wave data to test research hypotheses and adopts structural equation modeling to validate the whole conceptual model.

The research findings first reveal two trust mechanisms linking small talk and knowledge sharing. Meanwhile, the perceived similarity between employees, specifically, strengthens the affective pathway of trust rather than the cognitive pathway of trust.

This study combines Interaction Ritual Theory and constructs a dual-facilitating pathway approach that aims to reveal the impact of small talk on knowledge sharing, describing how and when small talk could generate a positive effect on knowledge sharing. This research provides intriguing and dynamic insights into understanding knowledge sharing processes.

Service work is often differentiated from manufacturing by the interactive labor workers perform as they come into direct contact with customers. Service organizations are particularly interested in regulating these interactions because they are a key opportunity for developing quality customer service, customer retention, and ultimately generation of sales revenue. An important stream of sociological literature focuses on managerial attempts to exert control over interactions through various techniques including routinization, standardization, and surveillance. Scripting is a common method of directing workers’ behavior, yet studies show that workers are extremely reluctant to administer scripts, judging them to be inappropriate to particular interactions or because they undermine their own sense of self. This paper examines a panoptic method of regulating service workers, embodied in undercover corporate agents who patrol employee’s adherence to scripts. How do workers required to recite scripts for customers respond to undercover control? What does it reveal about the nature of interactive labor? In-depth interviews with interactive workers in a range of retail contexts reveal that they mobilize their own interactional competence to challenge the effects of the panoptic, as they utilize strategies to identify and adapt to these “mystery shoppers,” all the while maintaining their cover. The paper shows the limits on control of interactive workers, as they maintain their own socialized sense of civility and preserve a limited realm of autonomy in their work.

The purpose of this study was, first, to link interpersonal-hedonic values, intuitive-experiential thinking style, external locus of control (LOC) and sociability to the need for interaction with a retail employee; and, second, to empirically test the moderating effect of the time convenience of self-service technologies (SSTs) on the proposed relationships in the model.

This study was conducted in a retail setting in which an automated checkout process occurred with the use of self-checkout systems. A self-administered, online survey approach was utilized targeting consumer panel members. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Interpersonal-hedonic values, external LOC and sociability emerged as reliable antecedents of the need for interaction with a retail employee, whereas the intuitive-experiential thinking style did not. This study also showed the inverse relationship between the need for interaction with a retail employee and the intentions to use SSTs. In relation to the moderating role of the time convenience of SSTs, the positive effects of interpersonal-hedonic values, intuitive-experiential thinking style, external LOC and sociability on the need for interaction with a retail employee were shown lesser for consumers with low levels of the time convenience of SSTs. The negative effect of the need for interaction with a retail employee on the intentions to use SSTs was shown to be greater for consumers with low levels of the time convenience of SSTs.

The present study adds to a growing body of literature on SSTs by exploring the causal and hierarchical effects of personality traits that determine the intentions to use SSTs.