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3368In recent years, research on customer behaviors has raised increasing attention among scholars. Totally, the focus of customer research witnessed a conversion from customer-company relationship to customer-employee interaction. However, existing studies in the customer-employee interaction domain have mostly discussed the negative outcomes of customers’ negative behaviors, and few of them have examined customers’ positive behaviors. In reality, companies, employees, and customers are not enemies; rather, they can create and share value through mutual understanding and civilized interaction. Therefore, it is necessary to deeply explore customers’ positive behavior in addition to customers’ negative behavior. Drawing on the Emotions as Social Information Model, this paper focuses on customer gratitude expression–a positive customer behavior which refers that customers express their gratitude to employees for employees’ service and contribution–and explores its impact on employees. Based on a sample of 304 leader-subordinate dyads, our findings suggested that customer gratitude expression promoted employees’ cognitive crafting, which further helped to improve employees’ working outcomes（i.e., deep acting in behavioral dimension and job performance in outcome dimension）. In addition, employees’ prevention focus–which represented more sensitivity to negative information and more intention to maintain the status quo–weakened the effect of customer gratitude expression on employees’ cognitive crafting and working outcomes. Our research made contributions in several aspects. Firstly, by examining the effect of customer gratitude expression on employees’ working outcomes, our research filled in the blank in customer-employee positive interaction domain, which not only inspired researchers to pay attention to “the other side of the coin”, but also offered practical implications for managers to build civilized customer-employee relationship. Secondly, our paper enriched the research about gratitude. Previous studies mostly identified customer gratitude as emotional states and examined its effect on customer per se. Our research, on the contrast, revealed the interpersonal effect of gratitude by exploring the impact of gratitude expression on receivers. Thirdly, our study answered the call of further investigating cognitive crafting by examining the antecedent（i.e., customer gratitude expression）and outcomes（i.e., employee working outcomes）of cognitive crafting, which also enlarges studies in the job crafting domain.
/ Journals / Foreign Economics & Management
Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
The Impact of Customer Gratitude Expression on Employee Working Outcomes and Its Mechanism
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 43, Issue 08, pp. 121 - 137 (2021) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20210104.105
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References
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Cite this article
Wang Qiqi, Li Zengxin, Liu Jun. The Impact of Customer Gratitude Expression on Employee Working Outcomes and Its Mechanism[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2021, 43(8): 121-137.
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