In organizational behavior, the most visible line of research on customer service comes from the climate for service perspective (Schneider, 1990), where research has demonstrated significant associations between employee attitudes about their jobs and organizations, and evaluations of satisfaction and service quality. A separate line of research in organizational behavior and sociology has studied customer service as a type of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1989). Using insights from both of these literatures, in this dissertation I focus on the importance of affect in the service encounter, and predict that (a) employee affective states influence the emotions they display to customers, (b) customers 'catch' the affect of employees through the process of emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994) and (c) customer affect influences customer judgements of satisfaction and service quality. The results were partially supportive of the hypotheses. Employee displayed emotions were positively associated with customer positive affect, and both employee emotional displays and customer positive affect were significant predictors of customer evaluations of service quality. The implications of these findings for advancing the study of service are discussed
