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This paper aims to examine the relationship between empathy and role stress among front line employees (FLEs). The goal was to test the hypothesis that emotionally critical aspects of the service encounter are central to role conflict.

A total of 226 FLEs completed a survey that measured role conflict. The instrument also included measures of empathy – the degree to which FLEs engaged in emotional labor during service encounters.

FLEs who reported more time spent engaged in empathetic behavior or saw empathetic behavior as critical to service quality also reported significantly higher role conflict.

Unfortunately, these data suggest that emotionally identifying with the customer relates to stressful service encounters for FLEs. This presents challenges to FLEs who truly identify with customer complaints and to organizations that rely on positive customer experience as a strategic tool for marketing services.

Role conflict research historically identifies service encounters as stressful. The present findings add to the literature by focusing on the intrapersonal world of FLEs and examining how their empathetic behavior relates to that stress.

The purpose of this study is to examine telephone surveillance in call centers and the role that job control plays in reducing the strain associated with the practice.

Supervisory practices influencing job control – a form of worker empowerment – were viewed by the study as a key variable mitigating the long‐standing relationship between telephone surveillance and work strain. As part of a field experiment, a sample of 163 service representatives completed a questionnaire measuring strain, perceived degree of surveillance, and job control.

Correlational and path analyses indicated that the strain associated with telephone surveillance could be explained by a loss of perceived control, even though service representatives had no direct control over the surveillance process itself.

These findings support previous research emphasizing the importance of task control during service encounters and suggest that supervisory practices that empower service workers may also reduce job strain. The immediate findings may be limited to the call center environment but recent research suggests that the control construct may be robust in other settings.

This project is one a few studies that outlines specific management practices that could reduce strain associated with telephone surveillance.

This research documents the requisite skills for business‐to‐business service representatives. Using job observation and group interviews, a list of 28 potential service skills was developed and placed into a questionnaire format. Experienced service representatives rated the importance of these skills for job success, yielding a complex ability profile. These abilities dovetail with previous work discussing service provider characteristics, yet offer a more detailed and behaviorally oriented view of the worker skills that ensure effective service encounters. Implications for understanding service demands and staffing a workforce with the skills needed to deliver quality service are discussed.

A study was conducted examining the relationship between perceived work stressors and job performance in a customer contact position. Workers served as technical liaison between clients and company engineers and were evaluated in terms of how efficiently communication networks were installed and maintained at the customer’s site. As predicted, a significantly greater proportion of individuals in the high performance group reported low levels of job stressors, suggesting that perceptions of job stress can relate to quality service. Implications of these findings for managing service positions are discussed.

Telephone service representatives in a communications company took part in a study investigating perceived job control and work strain. The representatives worked in a controlled environment, where tasks were automated by a sophisticated information system. Although most of the relevant research has occurred in the goods‐producing sector, it was hypothesized that job control impacted workers in a service setting as well. Results support the hypothesis. Higher levels of perceived job control were associated with lower levels of work strain. These findings have implications for management practices and job design in service centers.