Theoretical Orientation(s)
- Hodge-podge of theoretical approaches
- display of positive emotions by employees acts as control moves that bring
benefits to the organization
- skinnerian theories of learning -- warm smiles are reinforcing.
operant conditoning cycle
- vicarious learning (bandura) - sees other customers encounter positive
emotions
Quantitative phase
- contract situation: corp wants to check on their intuition
- franchise stores like 7/11
- smiles observed on individuals, but unit of analysis is the store. this is
always trouble
- observers placed in stores incognito
- picked one clerk
- measured:
- greeting only
- thanking
- smiling
- eye contact
- did they just count the number of these they saw? but time period was not
the same, nor the number of customers? says proportion of transactions
coded. What else was coded?
- any control for the number of customers seen at that time? sort of:
controlled for average line-length
Ecological fallacy
- sugar intake and stomach cancer. underlying variable is industrialization
- ice cream sales and drowning deaths: underlying variable is temperature
Quant results
- r-square pathetic
- negative relationship between positive emotion and sales
- maybe relationships is curvilinear
- maybe there is a moderating effect: when lines are short, smiling improves
sales.
Qual
- pace predicts emotions, not the other way around.
Problems
- failure to use interaction term
- lost the research objective.
- still fails to have a real process understanding of what's happening.
think it is just the reverse of what they thought. but actually, it is that
being nice takes time, which causes problems when busy, so when busy, people
respond by not being nice. therefore busyness causes people to be less nice.
Lessons
- Do the ethnography first
- don't do theory testing unless you've got a theory to test
- qual can provide the theory that connects the variables in a hypothesis
- don't be a pompous ass (testing the revised theoretical perspective)
Issues
- we must distinguish between research questions and data models. s&r
thought that smiles-->sales but then they learned they were wrong, instead it
is that sales-->non-smiles. this is an error. what the effect of smiles is on
sales is a legitimate research question that they have failed to answer.
should have learned that the effect of smiles on sales is moderated by
busyness. when busy, smiles lead to non-repeat. when not busy, smiles lead to
satisfied customers.
- in addition, it isn't really smiles is it? it's whether the transaction is
unnecessarily long -- customers are just as upset with happy chatty clerks as
with nasty argumentative ones.
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