Do recovery processes need empowered frontline employees?
International Journal of Operations & Production Management
ISSN: 0144-3577
Article publication date: 22 November 2019
Issue publication date: 22 November 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether frontline employee empowerment (FEE) is necessary in the presence of streamlined recovery processes when customers attribute responsibility for the recovery process to the service provider.
Design/methodology/approach
The hypotheses were tested through a survey conducted with 253 bank customers, combined with two laboratory experiments run with 354 undergraduate students to assess service recovery efforts by an online store and a clinical laboratory.
Findings
Customers who attribute more responsibility for the recovery process to service providers only become more satisfied with FEE when recovery processes are not streamlined. The presence of streamlined processes and FEE is not sufficient to raise post-recovery satisfaction levels in individuals who attribute little responsibility for the process to service providers.
Originality/value
The study extends the literature on contingencies that influence the design of recovery strategies by showing when FEE matters. It also highlights the risks of designing service recovery practices, such as FEE or streamlined recovery processes, without considering that different customers do not evaluate such efforts in the same fashion. Research on service recovery design needs to fully integrate concepts from marketing, operations and human resources when the goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of such practices. The outcomes also offer managers insights for designing recovery strategies.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper. The authors would like to sincerely thank the associated editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. The authors also thank a conference review team and seminar attendees for helpful comments on a earlier version of the manuscript.
Citation
Santos, J.B., Hernandez, J.M. and Leão, W. (2019), "Do recovery processes need empowered frontline employees?", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 39 No. 11, pp. 1260-1279. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOPM-12-2018-0745
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited