Frontline Employee Climate for Service Innovation, Customer-Perceived Retailer Innovativeness, and Store Financial Performance

摘要

Semi-autonomous frontline employee (FLE) teams are critical to service organizations' efforts to generate, test and implement successful innovations. In the present study, we introduce the idea of a retail store's climate for service innovation (CSI), delineated as the degree of support and encouragement an organization provides its employees to take initiative and explore innovative approaches in an effort to generate improved customer outcomes. As such, it is an indicator of the willingness and ability shown by store employees to implement and improvise service innovations that influence customers' collective perceptions of the retailer's innovativeness and improved store financial performance outcomes (Martins & Terblanche, 2003; Mumford & Gustafson, 1988). In addition, we examine the extent to which individual's psychological climate for service innovation is facilitated through three strategic HRM practices: training, appraisal, and employee voice. Our conceptualization distinguishes store climate for service innovation as a multi-faceted, unidimensional construct comprised by four dimensions: vision, participative safety, task orientation, and support for innovation. We present a conceptual underpinning for this new construct and a theoretical model which links individual and store-level (i.e., organizational) climate(s) for service innovation to key employee, customer and financial performance outcomes.