demands and resources. We thus suggest a new causal chain,
running from customer demands and customer resources to
customer satisfaction, mediated by frontline employees’ psychological
state and behavior.
To represent customer satisfaction, we use satisfaction with
the frontline employee, which we define as the customer’s
evaluation of her or his interaction with a frontline employee.
Customer demands are the extent to which frontline employees
encounter customers expressing negative behaviors.
Customer demands occur at the customer interface and include
behaviors such as hostility and complaining about frontline
employees. We further integrate customer resources, or
the extent to which frontline employees perceive their customers
as supportive of personal or work-related goals.
Customers can provide emotional support during interactions
with frontline employees, such as by valuing frontline employees’
work effort (Zimmermann et al. 2011). Drawing on
these and other emotional inputs, frontline employees gain
energy, which can influence their emotional state or achievement
of personal goals (Hobfoll 1989; Yoon et al. 2004).
Furthermore, as is known from literature on the servicedominant
logic or customer participation, customers also can
serve as important resources by providing valuable feedback
and information (Auh et al. 2007; Hsieh et al. 2004; Vargo and
Lusch 2004, 2008). By introducing knowledge, precisely describing
wishes, or providing possibilities for improvement,
customers enable frontline employees to deliver better services
and facilitate their work-related goal achievement (Payne et al.
2008). We accordingly distinguish emotional and cognitive
customer resources as antecedents of a frontline employee’s
state (see Fig. 1).
Frontline employees face both demanding and supportive
customers, so this study also investigates how demands and