Communal Orientation and Work Engagement Among Customer Service Providers: Role of Resilience and Interpersonal Conflict

Abstract

Customer interactions have emerged as a significant cause of work stress for customer service providers. The high levels of burnout and turnover that characterize the customer service providers are closely associated with customer stressors. However, employees who adopt a communal approach to customer relationships and resilient employees may encounter fewer of these challenging situations. Communal orientation refers to a disposition where individuals care for others based on their needs and welfare, with less expectation of return. The present study provides answers to the question that do customer service providers with communal orientation and high resilience get benefit from caring of their customers and how it affect their work engagement, by exploring the relationship between communal orientation, resilience and work engagement among customer service providers and examining potential mediating mechanisms of interpersonal conflict at work in these relationships. The study surveyed 400 customer service providers from telecommunication centers of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The participants’ communal orientations, resilience, interpersonal conflict and work engagement were evaluated by using reliable measures. As predicted, higher levels of employee communal orientation and resilience were positively associated with higher work engagement and these associations were partially explained by interpersonal conflict at work among customer service providers. This study contributes to the existing literature on relationship orientation by emphasizing the importance of having a communal orientation and resilience in customer-contact service jobs. The findings also highlight the significance of understanding how individual differences in interpersonal conflict at work may impact the engagement of employees in their work with high communal orientations and resilience. By recognizing communal orientation and resilience as crucial resources that establish employee work engagement, managers can make better decisions and explore effective solutions in terms of customer service provider’s recruitment, stress managing interventions, and investment in employee work engagement.