From Employee Motivation to Customer Well-being: A Dyadic Examination of Value Co-creation in Service Encounters

Abstract

This study examines the effects of frontline employees’ motivational drivers of value co-creation on customer experiential value and customer well-being, and how these relationships vary by employee gender and job position. Using dyadic data from 480 frontline employees and customers in Malaysian retail settings, we employ partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to test our proposed Motivation-Value-Well-being (MVW) framework. Multi-group analysis is used to compare the effects across employee gender and job position subgroups. The analysis reveals that professional identity, financial motives and career opportunities significantly enhance customer experiential value, while the recognition motive has an insignificant effect. Customer experience strongly predicts engagement, positive emotions and a sense of accomplishment. The multi-group analysis indicates that female and junior employees predominantly derive experiential value from career development opportunities. In contrast, male and senior employees exhibit a stronger response to financial rewards, recognition and incentives tied to professional identity. Managers can gain practical insights that can be leveraged to tailor motivation techniques by gender and hierarchical level to maximize value co-creation and improve customer experiences. The study advances service marketing theory by offering a dyadic, empirically validated framework linking frontline employee motivation and customer well-being and by providing new insights into differentiated motivational mechanisms across gender and hierarchical levels in service contexts.