서비스접점에서 부정적 상황요인이 판매원의 감정부조화와 고객 지향적 행동에 미치는 영향

Abstract

This paper conducts theoretical and practical research on the effect of negative situations in service encounter and salesperson's emotional dissonance. It also demonstrates the analysis of regulation effect if self-efficacy and empathy can reduce salesperson's emotional dissonance. For a practical analysis, a survey was carried out by targeting the salesperson who is currently working in duty free shops located in Seoul and Jeju. At firsthand, the data was collected from the selected target using sampling. Among 420 distributed copies, 384 copies were used in analysis of actual proof excluding 21 copies which were poorly answered. SPSS for Windows Release 15.0 and AMOS 7.0 were used to analyze the data. The empirical results are summarized as follows, First, the verification result of hypothesis 1 was that negative situations in service encounter dominantly affected to emotional dissonance. Employee factor had low significance when customer factor and environmental factor were not statistically convincing. Second, Hypothesis 2 was about the effect of salesperson's emotional dissonance toward customer-oriented behavior which was statistically proven to be adequate. Third. Hypothesis 3 argued that negative situation in service encounter has adverse effect on customer-oriented behavior. Analysis result shows that job factor has a dominant influence followed by customer factor and environmental factor. Fourth, Hypothesis 4 verified regulation effect of self-efficacy in terms of influencing relationship of negative situations toward emotional dissonance which was proved to be insignificant according to the analysis result. Fifth, Hypothesis 5 confirmed the regulation effect of empathy factor. The result proved that empathy has a regulating role toward influencing relationship of emotional dissonance in terms of negative customer factor and environmental factor exclusively. From the results above, we have the following marketing implications. First of all, company should manage negative situations in service encounter in two perspectives. One is managing job factor and employee factor which cause internal conflicts. Improvement of job factor should be carried out by arranging working hours based on regulations, assigning appropriate amount of workload, considering work concentration, and securing communicative atmosphere between all employees and amicable organization culture. The others are managing customer factor and environmental factor which are the actual conflict factors in service encounter. These can be improved by encouraging customer-oriented service mind through proper educational training, and support of management class for workplace environment. Second, the multidirectional effort to resolve emotional dissonance must be carried out taking into account the fact that salesperson's emotional dissonance has negative effect on customer-oriented behavior. In other words, emotional exhaustion and mental conflict caused by strict rules regarding expressing emotions, psychological stress and decline of commitment should be solved. Through reinforcing internal marketing capability for raising awareness of organization support, ownership, self-efficacy, and empathy awareness can be encouraged, thereby improving service quality. Third, effort should be made to enhance cognitive and emotional empathy. Salesperson can voluntarily control his or her emotions by improving empathy ability, however, it is necessary to conduct educational training to expand bond of empathy through various programs. Even though numerous enterprises try to reinforce customer service techniques using CS education, programs for raising empathy ability are insufficient. By implementing empathy education programs in accord with workplace and customer characteristics, salesperson's emotional dissonance can be reduced. This study, however, reveals several limitations as followings, First of all, it has limitations of selecting samples. It is impracticable to generalize the analysis result to all workplaces from department stores and duty free shops. In future research, it is necessary to supplement the representativeness of samples and expand the target workplace. Second, intensive research of salesperson's self-efficacy is required. The verification of self-efficacy's regulation effect is proved to be insignificant. If the effect can be proved by adopting multiple influencing relationships of moderating variables to verify salesperson's psychological and situational characteristics, more significant research result can be derived. Last, the problem of subdividing salesperson's workplaces. This study targeted salespersons in department stores and duty free shops. However, it could not conduct the subdivided comparative research in accord with multiple forms of items.