Effects of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ career growth: Perspective of self-determination theory

Abstract: Customer empowering behaviors, an emerging research topic in the fields of service management and organizational behavior, refer to employees’ perceptions of certain behaviors of customers or certain conditions created by customers in the service encounter contexts that make them feel motivated and competent to make independent decisions for achieving the desired service objects in the process of providing services (Dong et al., 2015; Tuan et al., 2019). Although this concept originally comes from “empowerment,” prior research on empowerment mainly focused on organizations (or leaders) empowering employees (e.g., empowering supervision, leadership empowerment behavior, employee empowerment, or employee psychological empowerment) and organizations empowering customers (e.g., customer empowerment or customer psychological empowerment), customers empowerment of employees (i.e., customer empowering behaviors) was given little attention. Therefore, this study focuses on the relatively new concept of customer empowering behaviors and aims to investigate their effects on the career growth of frontline service employees. To unravel the linking mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationship between customer empowering behaviors and employees’ career growth, we introduce organization-based self-esteem as a mediator and career centrality as a moderator, respectively, from the perspective of self-determination theory. We conducted a three-wave research design and achieved 245 valid samples from the frontline service employees of six garment sales enterprises in Guangzhou and Shantou cities of Guangdong Province. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the discriminant validity of key variables (i.e., customer empowering behaviors, organization-based self-esteem, career centrality, and career growth); the results yielded good distinctiveness. Then, we employed hierarchical multiple regression analyses and bootstrapping analyses to test the hypotheses. The results indicated the following: (1) customer empowering behaviors have a significant positive impact on employees’ career growth; (2) organization-based self-esteem plays a mediating role in the relationship between customer empowering behaviors and employees’ career growth; (3) career centrality plays a moderating role in the relationship between customer empowering behaviors and organization-based self-esteem; (5) career centrality further moderates the indirect effect of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ career growth via organization-based self-esteem. This study offers several theoretical and practical implications. First, it explores the impact of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ career outcomes (i.e., career growth) of frontline service employees. This is conducive to a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the consequences of customer empowering behaviors and provides new empirical evidence for expanding and enriching the research on customer empowering behaviors. Second, from the perspective of self-determination theory, this study confirms the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem and the moderating role of career centrality on the “customer empowering behaviors–career growth” connection, which reveals the “black box” and the boundary condition of the effects of customer empowering behaviors on employees. In practice, this study can help service enterprises and their managers understand the connotation and the effects of customer empowering behaviors more accurately, to improve their insight into the possible positive effects of these actions, and to strengthen their positive effects, such as promoting organization-based self-esteem and the career growth of their employees.