Frontline Employees’ Service Recovery Performance in Malaysian Hotels

There are many aspects in which service failures can occur, especially in a high-contact service setting. In any scenario where service failures do occur, frontline employees often play a critical role in addressing customer dissatisfaction, and this underscores the importance of examining employee’s Service Recovery Performance (SRP). Majority of past studies chose to test their model in the banking and manufacturing industries.Empirical findings within the hotel industry is seen as scarce. This study investigates a model of service recovery performance of frontline employees in the hotel industry, based on established model by Boshoff and Allen (2000). It investigates the relationship between SRP and selected organizational variables; customer service orientation, rewarding service excellence, empowerment, training, teamwork, role ambiguity and organizational commitment, as well as the impact that employees’ effective SRP may have on two identified outcome variables; job satisfaction and intentions to resign. However, there seems to be a gap in the model whereby it does not consider employee attitude as part of the antecedents. Existing model reflects a modification and refinement of previous model, hence an incorporation of motivation and trait competitiveness as part of the variables as having impact on employees’ SRP. Possible predictor variables of SRP were also given attention to. Additionally, unlike the majority of previous studies which focuses mainly from a western point of view, this study was carried out in an eastern setting. Frontline employees in Malaysian hotels were chosen as the respondents of the study. Questionnaires were distributed through mail survey for those outside of the Klang Valley. A total of 727 frontline hotel employees participated in this study. Data was then statistically analyzed using the SPSS version 16 software. Descriptive statistics gives a general description of the study’s respondents. Comparative analysis using Independent Sample T-test and One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is chosen to determine any existence of differences between relevant data. Factor Analysis is conducted as a means to verify the underlying factors or dimensions which would possibly represent the interrelationships of the variables in this study. Pearson Correlation is further used to establish relationship between frontline employees’ SRP and the identified antecedents as well as to answer the proposed hypotheses. Standard multiple regression analysis is also employed as the method for prediction purposes. Evidence was found to support all 11 hypotheses through the correlation results. This indicates that each construct have a significant relationship with SRP. Results from regression analysis determine that empowerment makes the strongest unique contribution in explaining frontline employees’ SRP. Motivation was the second highest followed by role ambiguity. Teamwork falls in the fourth place while trait competitiveness made the least contribution towards predicting SRP. The findings from this study provides interesting insights and results for discussion, while also extending previous research in the areas of service recovery, particularly with regard to frontline employee’s performance. On the whole, this study contributes to the present knowledge of SRP by integrating several antecedents and outcomes in a single, comprehensive model of SRP. This study also establishes the importance of managing frontline employees in order to achieve the objectives of a competitive service organization.

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