Employee satisfaction, responsiveness, and customer satisfaction: Linkages and boundary conditions

Linkage research has shown that employee satisfaction has a significant and substantive relationship with customer satisfaction, and this is suggested to occur due to both emotional contagion and performance mechanisms. In a study of 328 retail stores, we conduct a constructive replication and propose a theoretically and practically important boundary condition of these linkages. First, we support the partially mediating linkage of employee and customer satisfaction with a more precise and objective indicator of service behavior (i.e., responsiveness to customer requests for help), while using multi-source and time-lagged data and controlling for shared contextual features. Second, we propose that the impact of employee satisfaction depends on the busyness of the store, which constrains the affective and performance based mechanisms. Specifically, greater annual sales transactions (controlling for the number of employees) weaken the association of store employee satisfaction with both responsiveness to customers and customer satisfaction. Implications for theory-building and practices in service organizations are discussed.