Browsing by Author "Baker, Melissa Anne"

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    Justly so? Employee justice perceptions of legitimate and opportunistic complaints
    Baker, Melissa Anne (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-17)
    Unjust customer complaints are increasing, liberal redress policies are becoming more commonplace, and front line employees are expected to smile and just deal with fictitious complaints with redress and a sincere smile.  Is this justly so? This research helps to fill the current gaps in complaint, justice, and emotional labor research by empirically examining employee perceptions of perceived opportunistic versus perceived legitimate complaints.       This research completed one hotel and one restaurant study using  a 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental design to examine complaint type (opportunistic/ legitimate) and perceived organizational support (high/low).   Data was collected from a large reputable market research firm. Results find that employees from both studies experience statistically significantly lower perceptions of procedural, interactional, and distributive justice when dealing with opportunistic as opposed to legitimate complaints.  Perceptions of distributive justice statistically significantly increased employee\'s emotive effort and emotional dissonance.  Additionally, for all of the relationships in the hotel study and with distributive justice in the restaurant study, perceived organizational support had no significant effect on employee perceptions of justice or emotional dissonance or effort.   Managerial implications of employee justice perceptions and customer complaint policies are discussed.
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    Service behaviors and time preferences of rural and urban restaurant customers
    Baker, Melissa Anne (Virginia Tech, 2010-05-19)
    Do customers in rural and urban markets want the same thing from a restaurant server? While researchers have stressed the importance of sub-culture and made the call for empirical research, few studies have incorporated sub-culture into their research, especially within the hospitality industry. Empirically measuring the differences in sub-culture, may be especially important for restaurant operators as they serve and employ a myriad of different customers in different markets. One under researched yet critical way is through a better understanding of the importance of customer contact employees' behavior. Understanding the importance customers place on standard restaurant wait staff behaviors and time standards may be critical to earning customers satisfaction and patronage, yet few studies have empirically examined this. Developing enhanced ways of understanding how to adapt service delivery behavior to the values of major cultural groups can be extremely beneficial to hospitality managers. This study attempts to close these gaps by investigating the influence of sub-culture on consumer perceptions of behavioral and timing dimensions in a casual, full-service restaurant setting, through methodological sampling concentrating on two main sub-cultural groups: rural and urban restaurant patrons. Results indicated that sanitation and accommodation were the most important behavioral dimensions for both groups. The level of server responsiveness, friendliness, and knowledge were statistically different for the rural and urban samples. Results suggest that casual restaurant wait staff need to tailor service behavior by accommodating and customizing to the cultural and sub-cultural based guest needs in order to maintain a competitive advantage in satisfying customers. This study also demonstrates theoretical and managerial implications and suggests that further research is needed to investigate differences across other hospitality settings.