Globalization has led to an exponential growth of intercultural service encounters. Inudview of the importance of customer-orientation in services, we investigate the effect ofudthe frontline employee’s intercultural competence on customer’s affective and cognitiveudevaluations of intercultural service encounters. The focus of this study is on the effect ofudemployee cultural competence, relative to employee technical competence and culturaluddistance. A 2x2x2 full-factorial design (N= 322) with video vignettes was used.udMANOVA results show significant main effects of employee intercultural competenceudand employee technical competence on both types of customer evaluations. Moreover,udemployee intercultural competence positively moderates the effects of employeeudtechnical competence, and eliminates a negative effect of cultural distance. We concludeudthat employee intercultural competence is a powerful extra-role behavior with anudadditive effect on both the affective and cognitive evaluation of intercultural serviceudencounters, even when ETC is at a low level.
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