SERVSIG Special Session
Winter AMA 2023
Nashville, TN
Saturday 11 February
3:30 p.m.
The organizational frontline between service firm and customer has always been an important field for service researchers. The organizational frontline as “interactions and interfaces at the point-of-contact that promote, facilitate, or enable the exchange of valued resources between an organization and its key stakeholders” (Singh et al. 2017, p. 4) nowadays often involves technology and more recently also increasingly AI. Thus, research on the organizational frontline in service is a vibrant field that allows for broad and diverse research ranging from unsolved issues of human-to-human interaction to new phenomena, such as human-to-robot interactions. With the four papers, this proposed session highlights premier examples of such work and its implications for consumers, practitioners, policy-makers, and societies at large.
This session will illustrate the richness and relevance of organizational frontline research, an aspect that is of key interest to service researchers but also to other AMA conference attendees and will hopefully motivate more research on such matters.
Paper 1 When Robots Give You Instructions: The Role of Consumers’ Perceptions of Justice
Valentina Pitardi, University of Surrey*
Ana Valenzuela, Baruch College and ESADE-Ramon Llul
The first paper investigates the role of consumers’ perceptions of justice, when robots given them instructions. The fairness of a rule is affected by procedural and interactional justice, the type of service assistant (AI agent vs human) providing the rules influences consumers’ perceptions of procedural and interactional justice. The studies show that consumers are less satisfied with the overall experience when the request to comply with a rule is given by an AI service assistant. Furthermore, Pitardi and Valenzuela find evidence that procedural and interactional justice are the psychological mechanism driving non-compliant behavior with AI agents. By identifying conditions where such effect is reversed and attenuated this paper offers a new understanding of the impact of AI agents and service robots on consumer judgment and decision making.
Paper 2 Organizational Frontlines in the Digital Age: The Consumer-Autonomous Technology-Worker (CAW) Framework
Jenny van Doorn, University of Groningen*
Stefano Puntoni, University of Pennsylvania
Edin Smailhodzic, University of Groningen
Jan H. Schumann, University of Passau
Jia Li, Vlerick Business School
Jana Holthöwer, University of Groningen
The second paper develops the Consumer-Autonomous Technology-Worker (CAW) Framework. This framework addresses the problem that prior research on autonomous technology (AT) has largely assumed that AT will become a replacement for humans in the workplace, therewith focusing on the interaction between a dyad consisting of a human and AT. Research on AT-human teamwork has so far largely focused on how the cooperation in which AT supplements humans is perceived by the human side of the team. In this paper, the authors expand the focus of the literature beyond consumer-machine interactions and worker-machine interactions in isolation by the CAW framework. The CAW framework considers the more complex nature and implications of consumer-worker-machine interactions in combination. The authors also illustrate the relevance of their framework and the avenues for future research with a series of interviews they conducted in hospitality contexts.
Paper 3 Signaling Capacity To Care: CSR Programs Promote Frontline Employee Engagement by Making them Feel Valued
Michael Giebelhausen, Clemson University
Stacey Robinson, University of Alabama*
The third paper shows how CSR Programs promote frontline employer engagement by making them feel valued. Results of a large US service firm’s annual customer surveys combined with each stores’ annual CSR contributions provide evidence a firm’s CSR activities can heighten employee engagement – notably to the point that this heightened engagement is observable to customers. Moreover, results from a secondary dataset containing aggregated employee satisfaction surveys from a national quick service chain suggest while many CSR programs promote the firm’s image externally, they seemingly foster a sense of caring that extends to the employees themselves; and this sense of feeling cared for appears to be more influential in driving employee engagement.
Paper 4 Rethinking Internal and External Service Marketing: The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Technostress
Jens Hogreve, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt*
Anja Iseke, Technische Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe
Klaus Derfuss, University of Hagen
The fourth paper puts the traditional and well-established concept of the Service-Profit Chain (SPC) into a new context. The authors rethink the SPC conceptually and discuss how the implementation of artificial intelligence might call for the consideration of additional variables as well as variations of the chain’s structure. These changes need to consider potential positive and negative stress that might come along with technology implementation at the frontline. Doing so, the authors propose also widening the focus from employee and customer satisfaction towards the well-being of individuals. The paper proposes a transformed framework, making the SPC future ready. Detailed avenues for future research will be provided and discussed.
- In order to facilitate a lively interaction, each presentation will be restricted to fifteen minutes. In the remaining time, presenters will work as a team to try to discuss the findings emerging from the presentations. Audience members will be asked to provide ideas and to ask questions that address the linkages between the papers.
- Presenters will work as a team to try to answer those questions. They will also discuss the findings emerging from the presentations, outline a broader picture on overarching topics that connect the different papers, as well as suggest additional emerging research topics with societal relevance in services.
SERVSIG Session Chair: Jan H. Schumann, Professor of Marketing and Innovation, School of Business, Economics and Information Systems, University of Passau, Germany
