Can I Live Up to That Ad? Impact of Implicit Theories of Ability on Service Employees’ Responses to Advertising
研究服务员工对广告中模范行为的反应，发现员工的能力信念（固定或可塑）与广告挑战程度共同影响其模仿动机，对管理者设计内部广告有参考价值。
Service researchers have postulated that ads have an important “second” audience, namely an organization’s own service employees. Specifically, ads may depict how employees deliver on the service promise, thereby communicating to other service employees what kind of behaviors they are expected to perform. This research examines when and to what extent service employees are motivated to live up to such ad models. Two experiments at a Swiss bank demonstrate that the effectiveness of an ad model is determined not only by the challenge presented by the model’s behavior but also by an employee’s implicit beliefs. Employees who believe that their abilities are fixed (i.e., entity-focused) are more motivated to imitate an ad model if the model’s behavior is moderately challenging rather than strongly challenging. In contrast, employees who believe that their abilities are malleable (i.e., incremental-focused) are not affected by how challenging the model’s behavior is. Moreover, the reactions of entity-focused employees to challenging ads may be improved by encouraging them to mentally simulate the process they need to go through to achieve a similar performance as the model.