Effect of New Goal Disclosure on Service Employee's Effort Allocation: A Quasi-Experiment Study

Employees play a key role in implementing firms’ service strategies with new and established customers. However, few empirical studies have investigated whether and how service employees voluntarily adapt their behaviors in alignment with their organization’s customer service strategies. By applying organizational learning theory, this study hypothesizes and investigates how goal disclosure in a firm’s work system influences service employees’ effort allocation between new and established customers. The results suggest that service employees voluntarily adjust their effort allocation in response to the new goal. Furthermore, the adjustment is amplified for service employees with a more diversified customer portfolio and higher past performance. This study supports that goal disclosure per se, even in the absence of monetary incentives, can motivate service employees’ effort allocation. Important contributions and implications are also discussed in the paper.