The effect of customer participation on service providers' job stress

There have been conflicting explanations of how customer participation affects service providers' job stress. This study explores the relationship between the two. Survey data from 293 customer-contact employees at 64 restaurants in Taiwan indicate that customer participation is positively related to perceived job stress and perceived workload, implying that it is inappropriate to explain job stress from the perspective of partial employees. Moreover, while customer participation increases the level of job stress, workload is only a superficial explanation for the relationship. The real explanation is role conflict, which is associated with changes in job characteristics. Implications of these findings for managing customer participation are subsequently discussed.