Luận văn thạc sĩ UEH influence of problematic customers on employees emotional exhaustion and

UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY

International School of Business

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LE HA THU

INFLUENCE OF PROBLEMATIC

CUSTOMERS ON EMPLOYEE’S

EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION AND

TURNOVER INTENTIONS

MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours)

Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014

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UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY

International School of Business

------------------------------

LE HA THU

INFLUENCE OF PROBLEMATIC

CUSTOMERS ON EMPLOYEE’S

EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION AND

TURNOVER INTENTIONS

ID: 22120032

MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours)

SUPERVISORS: PROF. DR. NGUYEN DONG PHONG

Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014

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ABSTRACT

Basically, the research not only examines the effect of problematic customers verbally and non￾verbally on employees, which can lead to job dissatisfaction and turnover intention, but also to

see if perceived organizational justice moderates the influence and to what extent. By utilizing

a sample of 369 customer service officers in Ho Chi Minh City, Cronbach’s alpha reliability

analysis, EFA and multiple regression analysis function was used to have the most accurate

data.

The study results illustrate strong interactions of both abusive and unreasonably demanding

customers with employees’ emotional exhaustion. It also proves that affecting emotional side

of staffs could lead to job satisfaction and turnover intention simultaneously. Fortunately,

perceived organizational justice negatively moderates the relationship between unreasonably

demanding customers and emotional exhaustion of employees. Overall, the results help

managers to view the organizational dynamic from perspective of staffs. Furthermore,

Vietnamese enterprises should start to apply more training sections on client service in general

and fair and sensible working procedure in specific to balance customer-employee relationship.

Although there are some limitations in the paper, valuable directions for future and further

researches are available.

Key words: problematic customers, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, turnover intention,

perceived organizational justice.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1................................................................................................................................................... 8

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 8

1.1 Research background ...................................................................................................................... 8

1.2 Research problem.......................................................................................................................... 10

1.3 Research objectives....................................................................................................................... 11

1.4 Research scope .............................................................................................................................. 11

1.5 Research contributions and implications....................................................................................... 11

1.6 Structure of the thesis.................................................................................................................... 11

Chapter 2................................................................................................................................................. 13

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT...................................................... 13

2.1 Theoretical background................................................................................................................. 13

2.1.1 Problematic customers............................................................................................................ 13

2.1.2 Problematic customers and Emotional exhaustion ................................................................. 14

2.1.3 Emotional exhaustion and Turnover intentions for customer-related activities..................... 15

2.1.4 Emotional exhaustion and Job satisfaction for customer-related activities............................ 16

2.1.5 Job satisfaction and Turnover intentions for customer-related activities............................... 16

2.1.6 Perceived organizational justice (POJ)................................................................................... 17

2.2 Proposed model ............................................................................................................................. 19

2.3 Hypotheses summary .................................................................................................................... 19

2.4 Chapter summary .......................................................................................................................... 20

Chapter 3................................................................................................................................................. 22

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY............................................................................................................ 22

3.1 Research design process................................................................................................................ 22

3.2 Measurement scales....................................................................................................................... 23

3.3 Sampling........................................................................................................................................ 27

3.3.5 Data collection method ......................................................................................................... 28

3.3.6 Data analysis method............................................................................................................ 28

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3.4 Chapter conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 30

Chapter 4................................................................................................................................................. 31

4.1 Sample analysis............................................................................................................................. 31

4.1.1 Sample description and data clearance ................................................................................... 31

4.1.2 Demographics of respondents................................................................................................. 31

4.2 Measurement reliability and validity............................................................................................. 33

4.2.1 Cronbach’s alpha analysis ...................................................................................................... 33

4.2.2 Exploratory factor analysis (EFA).......................................................................................... 35

4.2.3 Regression analysis................................................................................................................. 40

4.2.4 Final model and Chapter summary......................................................................................... 46

Chapter 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS................................................................... 47

5.1 Findings and discussion................................................................................................................. 47

5.2 Implications and recommendations............................................................................................... 48

5.3 Limitations and future research direction...................................................................................... 49

References............................................................................................................................................... 50

QUESTIONNAIRE ................................................................................................................................ 60

APPRENDIX 1 – DESCRIPTIVE INFORMATION............................................................................. 70

APPRENDIX 2 – CRONBACH’S ALPHA ........................................................................................... 71

APPRENDIX 3 - RESULTS OF MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION ............................................. 89

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Survey item summary ...................................................................................................23

Table 2. Sample characteristics...................................................................................................32

Table 3. Cronbach's alpha reliability test result ..........................................................................34

Table 4. EFA results – Scales without modification...................................................................36

Table 5. KMO and Bartlett’s Test for all variables.....................................................................38

Table 6. The result of multiple linear regressions of all independent variables and Emotional

exhaustion....................................................................................................................................40

Table 7. The result of simple linear regressions of Emotional exhaustion and Job satisfaction 42

Table 8. The result of multiple linear regressions of Emotional exhaustion and Job satisfaction

as independent variables and Occupational turnover as dependent variable ..............................44

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. The proposed research model ......................................................................................19

Figure 2. Research design process ..............................................................................................22

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The chapter contains five sections. The first part introduces the background of research,

where and why this research takes place. Secondly, the purposes of this thesis and the research

scope are informed in the chapter. Next, some contributions and implications are mentioned.

And finally, the research structure is addressed at the end of this chapter.

1.1 Research background

Since 1909, the famous motto of Harry Gordon Selfridge about customer satisfaction

“Customer is always right” has been widely used by every business in customer service sector

or department. Started from the basic idea that customer complaints should be taken seriously,

customer satisfaction has become a critical element for a successful organization. Many

researchers have explored the link between customer satisfaction and business performance in

both firm-level and macro-level analysis (Williams & Naumann, 2011). Employees are

coached and trained to be fully aware of meeting customers’ requirements. However, the

pressure of satisfying these needs sometimes can be stressful, for example in Vietnam, the level

of employee intent to stay in the organization is lower than those of other countries in the Asia

Pacific Region, although the employee engagement level of Vietnamese companies is much

higher (Ruge, 2011). According to Ruge in the presentation to the America Chamber of

Commerce in February of 2011, the most possible cause for this can be excessive workload and

job pressure. Moreover, the highest rates of employee turnover go to Business, Technical

support and Production, Operation support with average 12% and 17% in the report for

Vietnam Labor Market Overview and Trends (Lu, 2012), which are positions have the most

interactions with customers. This is beyond common job satisfaction. Basically, it is not only

about job security, benefits and opportunities for development but also about the feeling that

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they are respected and protected from verbally abused, threatened with violence or even

physically attacked.

The significance of employee engagement, nevertheless, is not usually considered as an

objective for organizations. Achieving customer satisfaction, on the other hand, is often the

ultimate goal for managers, particularly those in service industries as evidenced by the

emphasis on customer satisfaction survey. Meeting the demands of customers as much as

possible is one of the solutions since satisfaction is based on a customer’s experience of the

extent to which a provider fulfills his or her expectations (Gerpott et al, 2001). Nonetheless, not

every requirement can be met immediately and be the reason to have unpleasant or problematic

customers (Grandey et al, 2004). There is a claim that the bigger customers are the more

demanding they become and sometimes, the more unreasonable they can be. This happens due

to the unequal power between customer-employee relationships as “the customer is always

right” and occurs aggression from customers (Allen and Gilbert, 2002, p.551).Unfortunately,

most studies, such as Chinh and Anh (2008), Burrows et al. (2009), Hau and Thuy (2012), on

customer-employee relationship in Vietnam have disregarded the mental side of employees

while overestimating the customers’ behaviors and opinions. Therefore, these factors can cause

emotional exhaustion for customer service officers, who have to deal face-to-face with this

problem every day. The employee commitment to customer-oriented activities can be

negatively affected, which potentially leads to employee turnover. Although they want to stay

in the company, will they be still willing to do customer-related tasks, or will they just leave

and find another career path which can be less stressful? In such cases, the role of managers

and companies in handling complaints and solving customer-related issues is extremely critical.

There are possibilities that organizational considerations can moderate these problems by

perceived organizational support or justice, which have been demonstrated in various studies

about perceived organization justice and work-related attitudes (Elamin, 2012; Howard and

Cordes, 2010).

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