The effect of customer demands and resources on attitude and behavioral intention of frontline employees

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this research is twofold; first, it attempts to categories customer demands into challenging and hindrance stressors, second, it investigates the effect of customer challenging stressors, hindrance stressors and customer resources on job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion and turnover intention of frontline employees. Research design, data, and methodology - A quantitative research method with an online survey was adopted to test the proposed hypotheses. Sample was collected from 186 frontline employees. And, structural equation model was conducted through AMOS 20.0 to verify the proposed hypotheses. Results - First, customer challenging stressors and customer resources positively affect job satisfaction. Second, customer hindrance stressors negatively affect job satisfaction and positively affect emotional exhaustion. Finally, job satisfaction negatively affects turnover intention whereas emotional exhaustion positively affects turnover intention of frontline employees. Contributions - In term of theoretical contributions, the current study categorized the customer demands into challenging and hindrance stressors and empirically tested the effect of challenging and hindrance stressors on emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction and turnover intention of frontline employees. Managerially, this study provides insights to the firm by highlighting the presence of challenging stressors and customer resources which have positive effect on the attitudes and behaviors of the frontline employees.