Performance Evaluation And Employee Productivity In Nigerian Service Industry

Performance Evaluation

Introduction

In a turbulent business environment of scarce resources, intense competitive pressures, and rapid rates of technological change, hospitality firms aim to focus on flawless service quality to gain and sustain competitive advantages for success and survival. According to the resource-based view, inimitable human resources (e.g., highly qualified and meritorious frontline or customer-contact employees) serve this purpose.

Frontline employees are in frequent face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions with customers and do emotional labor, which is defined as “the effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally desired emotion during interpersonal transactions” (Morris and Feldman, 1996, p. 987). There are three modes of acting: surface, active deep, and passive deep (Hochschild, 1983). Surface acting occurs when employees fake their emotions by changing their outer demeanor to conform with the organizational display rules while the inner feelings remain unchanged (Zapf et al., 1999).

Problem Analysis

Against this backdrop, this study develops and tests a model, which investigates emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion among frontline hotel employees in a developing sub-Saharan country, Nigeria. Specifically, the relationships of negative affectivity as a dispositional personality variable and intrinsic motivation as a personal resource with emotional dissonance and exhaustion are examined. Job performance and turnover intentions, which are the two organizationally valued outcomes, are treated as the consequences of emotional dissonance and exhaustion. This empirical study treats emotional dissonance as a potential mediator between personality variables and emotional exhaustion. This study also focuses on emotional exhaustion as a potential mediator between emotional dissonance and job outcomes.

Purpose of Study

The purpose of the study is to identify the performance evaluation and employee productivity techniques in Nigerian service industry

Significance of Study

There are potential contributions of this empirical study. First, an observation made from a synthesis of the relevant literature illustrates that empirical research appertaining to emotional dissonance and exhaustion in developing countries, especially in the sub-Saharan African countries, is sparse. Not surprisingly, empirical studies in the services marketing literature using data from the developing sub-Saharan African countries are meager (Svensson et al., 2008). Therefore, the present study extends the existing research stream to Nigeria, which is one of the ignored developing sub-Saharan African countries. Second, emotional labor is an underresearched topic in the hospitality management and marketing literatures ([Chu and Murrmann, 2006] and [Kim, 2008]).

Hypotheses

The Conservation of Resources (COR) theory is one of the theories used for developing the relevant relationships in our study, in addition to the perception mechanism and the basic theory of heat-affect-overload. The COR theory defines resources as “…those entities that either are centrally valued in their own right, or act as means to obtain centrally valued ends” (Hobfoll, 2002, p. 307). According to the theory, there are four fundamental resource categories: object, personal, condition, and energy resources (Hobfoll, 1989). Individuals seek to acquire, maintain and preserve certain resources. Stress occurs in the workplace when (a) individuals are confronted with the threat of loss of resources, (b) individuals lose their resources, and (c) individuals invest resources and do not harvest ...