Empirical Research on Customer Participation and Service Providers' Job Stress in Service Industry

摘要

There have been conflicting explanations of how customer participation affects service providersȁ9; job stress in service industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between customer participation and service providers'' job stress. Use survey data collected from 172 teachers at university in China to do correlation and regression analyses by SPSS. Empirical results of survey data indicate that customer participation is negatively related to workload and job stress. It shows the more extensive the customer participation, the greater the amount of work that can be shifted to the customer which remove some of the service providersȁ9; workload to reduce their job stress. So the paper supports that it is appropriate to explain job stress basing from the perspective of partial employees. Implications of these findings for managing customer participation, as well as future research directions, are subsequently discussed.