Bringing Service Interactions Into Focus: Prevention- Versus Promotion-Focused Customers’ Sensitivity to Employee Display Authenticity
研究发现，预防导向的顾客比促进导向的顾客对员工不真实的情感展示更敏感，不真实展示会通过被感知的欺骗性降低服务绩效，如小费收入。
Despite growing managerial interest in frontline employee behavior, and in display authenticity specifically, customers’ heterogeneous reactions to authentic displays have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on emotion as social information theory, we investigate the role of motivational orientations (i.e., regulatory focus) in customer reactions to authentic displays. The findings show that inauthentic displays have stronger negative effects on service performance for prevention-focused than for promotion-focused customers. A dyadic field study details these effects in terms of tipping, and three experiments provide further evidence by experimentally manipulating authenticity and regulatory focus. The conditional effect of authenticity on service performance also is mediated by inferred deception. Specifically, prevention-focused customers interpret inauthentic emotion displays as more deceptive than promotion-focused customers do. Managers should prime customers’ promotion focus using marketing communications before the service delivery when inauthentic displays are likely as well as consider customers’ regulatory focus when designing authenticity training for employees.