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Service employees’ concurrent adaptive and unethical behaviors in complex or non-routine tasks: The effects of customer control and self-monitoring personality

Author

Listed:
  • Jixia Yang

    (City University of Hong Kong)

  • Kuo Hui Frank Yu

    (University of California, Berkeley)

  • Chi-Jui Huang

    (National Taipei University)

Abstract

We investigate how uncertainty-ridden task environments simultaneously trigger both positive and negative coping behaviors among front-line service employees. We suggest that complex and non-routine tasks give rise to employees’ exercise of both creative discretion such as adaptive selling and deviant discretion such as unethical selling behavior. Moreover, customer control moderates these relations by constraining employees’ adaptive selling and encouraging unethical selling. We propose three-way interactions, where an employee’s self-monitoring trait further influences customer control’s moderating effects. We collected 798 service episodes from 55 financial service employees in Hong Kong and Taiwan. We find that task complexity and task non-routineness relate to adaptive selling and unethical selling; low self-monitors engage in most adaptive selling in complex tasks with low controlling customers; and high monitors engage in most unethical selling in non-routine tasks with high controlling customers. Our person-environment-process model informs front-line discretion theory as well as management and practice of front-line discretion.

Suggested Citation

  • Jixia Yang & Kuo Hui Frank Yu & Chi-Jui Huang, 2019. "Service employees’ concurrent adaptive and unethical behaviors in complex or non-routine tasks: The effects of customer control and self-monitoring personality," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 36(1), pages 245-273, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:asiapa:v:36:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10490-018-9567-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s10490-018-9567-y
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Ming Kong & Jie Xin & Wenxiao Xu & Haonan Li & Dandan Xu, 2022. "The moral licensing effect between work effort and unethical pro-organizational behavior: The moderating influence of Confucian value," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 39(2), pages 515-537, June.

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