Serving employees in service organizations: Three competing models of organizational climate for employee well-being. Effects on organizational effectiveness
Description
Must service organizations have climates for employee well-being to ensure organizational effectiveness, and if so, why? Addressing these important questions, this dissertation introduces and examines three competing models of organizational climate for employee well-being effects on organizational effectiveness, indexed as customer satisfaction. Model I suggests that a climate for employee well-being is an antecedent of a climate for service, which in turn affects service performance and customer satisfaction. Model II suggests that both a climate for employee well-being and a climate for service have main effects on service performance and subsequent customer satisfaction. Model III is an exploratory model that proposes an interaction effect of climates for employee well-being and for service on service performance and customer satisfaction. That is, in the absence of a positive climate for service, the relationship between a climate for employee well-being and service performance (and customer satisfaction) is posited to be negligible. In the presence of a positive climate for service, however, this relationship is posited to be positive Cross-sectional and longitudinal tests of the three models in a sample of 160 bank branches produced high fit indices for each model, but the patterns of path coefficients were not supportive of the models with one exception, namely a longitudinal version of Model I. The discussion highlights two story lines. First, I suggest that the absence of cross-sectional relationships between the 1995 climate for service and the 1995 customer variables, while relationships between the 1993 climate for service and the 1995 customer variables were found, can be explained as the result of changing climates and time lags in climate effects on customer variables. Indeed, post-hoc analyses showed that the climate for service had changed to the worse from 1993 to 1995. Second, in light of the high fit indices for all models, I could not identify one best fitting model. The interpretational ambiguity, which resulted from the high fit indices across the models, is informative because it helps to put past one-model research into perspective. The implications of the findings for service researchers and practitioners are also discussed