Your thanks make me work harder: A multiple identification perspective

Customers interact directly with service employees and influence their attitudes and behaviors, but the extant research mainly focuses on receipt of coworker or leader gratitude (i.e., intra-organization sourced gratitude), with little attention on receipt of customer gratitude (i.e., extra-organization sourced gratitude). Integrating emotions as social information theory with a social identity approach, this research aims to address this issue by exploring why and when receipt of customer gratitude contributes to employees' work effort. Through a field study and an experiment, we found that: (1) receipt of customer gratitude promotes employees' occupational and organizational identification, both of which in turn lead to increased work effort; (2) employees' other-orientation can enhance the positive relationships between receipt of customer gratitude and occupational and organizational identification; and (3) employees' other-orientation strengthens the positive relationship between receipt of customer gratitude and employees' work effort through both occupational and organizational identification. These findings have notable implications for research and practice.