Managing customer services: Psychological empowerment and service-oriented organizational citizenship Behaviors

As the importance of service sectors in the world economy has, been continuously increasing, service innovation became one of the pertinent research focus over the coming years. Due to the unique characteristics of service firms, customer-contact employees play an important role in the service innovation to meet the changing needs of their customers. This present study is conducted using questionnaire responses to explore how psychological empowerment could affect the behaviors of customer-contact employees in service delivery. The data was collected from 247 customer-contact employees in five different service sectors such as hotels, banks, auto service and etc. The results of correlation analysis and linear regression analysis indicated that psychological empowerment has a positive impact on service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors. Internalization of SE and job competence are related to all the three types of service-oriented OCBs, with internalization of SE emerging as the stronger driver. And job autonomy only accounts for the variance of participation OCBs. Besides, the significant difference of service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior was found among five service sectors through One-Way ANOVA. Finally, the theoretical progresses and practical implications of this paper are discussed. The study extends prior citizenship research in service contexts and indicates many practices to encourage the customer-contact employees to take initiatives in service innovation.