Rule Enforcement with Sensitivity: The role of service — enforcement ambidexterity in fostering service delivery quality

Light lunch will be provided.

Zoom link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/9488673532

In this presentation, Dr Yumeng Yue examines the increasingly paradoxical demands placed on frontline service teams: they must enforce service rules while simultaneously maintaining flexibility and responsiveness to individual customers. Drawing on the literature on organizational ambidexterity, Yumeng proposes that service teams able to balance a rule-enforcement orientation with a customer orientation—what he terms service-enforcement ambidexterity—will achieve higher overall service delivery quality.

Using data collected from 367 mortgage advisors across 38 service teams, Yumeng examines the mechanisms through which service-enforcement ambidexterity translates into better service outcomes. Specifically, he considers whether team-level collective reflection (i.e., team reflexivity) and individual-level reflection (i.e emotional reflection) help explain these effects. He also examines team and individual autonomy as moderating conditions that enable the benefits of service-enforcement ambidexterity to emerge. He concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding how frontline service teams navigate the competing demands of rule enforcement and customer responsiveness.

About the speaker

Dr Yumeng Yue (PhD, UNSW Australia) is a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Organizational Behaviour at the University of Edinburgh Business School. His research focuses on the organization and structuring of frontline service work, with particular interests in emotional labor, customer incivility, self-service technologies, and frontline teamwork. His work has been published in journals including Personnel Psychology, Journal of Service Research, and European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology. His research has also received a Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Group & Organization Management and the Australian Journal of Management.