Psychological collectivism as a moderator of the impact of supervisor-subordinate personality similarity on employees' service quality

Abstract

Researchers have found psychological collectivism (PC) to play a moderating role in relationships among certain constructs. Situational characteristics may have different impacts on individualists and collectivists, who have discrepant attitudes and values regarding interpersonal relationships. The collectivists strongly value harmonious relationships with others, and would be demoralised when such relationships are threatened or do not materialise at all. The individualists view the self as the basic unit of survival, and are less affected even if harmony is not guaranteed. On the basis of this PC-as-moderator perspective, we expected that the effect of supervisor-subordinate personality similarity on the quality of service an employee delivers would be stronger among collectivists than among individualists. This hypothesis was tested with 605 front-line customer service staff and 113 supervisors, whose personality similarity was indexed by the number of personality items to which both parties gave the same answers. Although psychological collectivism does not have direct effect on service quality, regression analysis shows that it interacts with personality similarity, lending further support to the PC-as-moderator model.