Impact of HRM Practices on Customer Service Outcome through Mediation of Emotional Performance and Moderation of Organizational Justice

Abstract

The economy worldwide has become increasingly service oriented and organizations are facing the challenge of providing exceptional customer service. Given the strong links established between employee‘s emotional performance and customer service outcome, there remains a need for clear understanding of the processes by which the employees comply with emotional demands at work. Scholars have developed an integrated conceptual framework highlighting how HR practices (related to three broad HR domains i.e. ability-enhancing HR practices, motivation-enhancing HR practices and opportunity-enhancing HR practices) should elevate emotional performance. The AMO framework suggested that ensuring the employee's discretionary effort needed three components: employees had to have the necessary skills, they needed appropriate motivation and employers had to offer them the opportunity to participate. To address this research gap in the literature, this research has examined the impact of those HR practices on customer service outcome in the banking sector of Punjab, Pakistan. This study also proposed and analyzed the mediating effect of emotional performance on the relationship between HR practices and the customer service outcome. Moreover, moderating effect of organizational justice was also examined on the above relationships. Furthermore in the domain of social exchange theory (SET), organizational justice is related with the standard of mutual social interaction between the employees and their organizations. The research used a quantitative method through survey instrument and 467 usable questionnaires were collected from the employees and same numbers of questionnaires were also collected from customers of banks of Punjab, Pakistan. Partial Least Squares (PLS) was employed to analyze the data. The results implied that motivation-enhancing HR practices and opportunity enhancing HR practices are linked with customer service outcome but ability-enhancing HR practices are not linked directly with customer service outcome.