Reenergizing Through Angel Customers: Cross-Cultural Validation of Customer-Driven Employee Citizenship Behavior

Abstract

This study proposes and examines the role server-friendly customers play in the customer-employee exchange stage of service encounters, and how customer-employee exchange relates to employee organizational citizenship behaviors toward customers, colleagues, and hotel organizations. To further explain how service employees could reenergize through the psychological resources gained from server-friendly customers at the point of customer-employee exchange, conservation of resources theory was applied. Hotel employees in the United States and China were sampled to jointly examine our proposed model. Findings of this study contribute valuable theoretical implications by emphasizing the role of customer-employee exchange in the formation of employee citizenship behaviors, as well as practical implications with regard to mentoring employees, thus strategically reenergizing psychological resources and obtaining tacit knowledge of citizenship behavior and its practice.