Who's the boss? Contending with competing expectations from customers and management

Executive Summary Customer-contact workers routinely face competing expectations from management and customers. While management expects customer-contact workers to follow their rules in order to provide efficient and consistent high-quality service, customers often have needs and requests that require customer-contact workers to bend the rules in order to fulfill them. When customers, through commissions, tips, or other means, directly reward these customer-contact workers, the dilemma becomes even more intense. While this problem is well-established, we know little about how and why customer-contact workers choose between satisfying customer or management expectations. Our study examines the process that customer-contact workers go through to make this choice. By developing psychological contracts with both customers and management, customer-contact workers balance the costs and benefits associated with meeting/not meeting their competing expectations. In order to mitigate the problem of customer-contact workers choosing to satisfy the customer at the expense of management, managers need to develop relational contracts with their employees.