The Role of Employee Attachment in Creating Service Climate: A Low-Skilled Workers’ Perspective: An Abstract

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study combines insights from attachment theory, services research, and organizational management to investigate how a Chinese restaurant chain creates a strong service climate by satisfying emotional attachment needs of low-skilled employees. Employee attachment has been used extensively to predict employees’ attitudes and behaviors (Wang et al. 2018), which are important for service climate (Hong et al. 2013). Despite the importance of attachment to understand employees’ attitudes, behavior and positive service climate, the use of attachment theory in services research is still recent. Scholars identify the need to understand the antecedents of service climate (Bowen and Schneider 2014). Specifically, how employees bond with co-workers to align their personal goals with those of the organization (Tang et al. 2014), how these bonds relate to social stressors (such as those caused by supervisors or colleagues), and the impact on service climate. This understanding is relevant in the context of low-skilled Chinese workers moving from the countryside to the city, leaving their families behind, and facing adaptation difficulties, which in turn activates their attachment system. While prior literature has identified the positive impact of valuable employees on firm performance, studies have focused on highly-educated workers in Western economies (Swart and Kinnie 2010). Research on developing country contexts and low-skilled workers is scant and increasingly important. Our research helps to address this gap by developing an in-depth understanding of the processes that support low-skilled workers to feel secure with multiple relationships at work (Yip et al. 2018). We conduct a case study of Hai Restaurant, named the fastest growing Chinese restaurant chain by the China Chain Store and Franchising Association in 2008. Hai Restaurant employs rural migrants and this new context activates new employees’ attachment system, as moving far from their families causes separation anxiety (Qin et al. 2014). This paper (1) uncovers the approaches that enable low-skilled employees to develop multiple emotional attachments, advancing the understanding of normative attachment; (2) develops new insights on how attachment bonds among low-skilled workers inform service climate; (3) offers a new conceptualization for the antecedents of service climate that adds employees’ emotional attachment needs to human resources practices; and (4) augments previous literature on superior firm performance delivered by a highly-educated workforce with insights on how service value can be produced by low-skilled workers.