While digital media changed the nature of communication in service contexts, often allowing customers to interact instantly with service providers, the implications and opportunities for managing service employees are widely unknown. This is surprising, given that service employees are an important determinant of service firms’ success. This article examines the effects of real-time performance feedback on employees’ service performance and investigates both how and under what conditions timely feedback encourages employees’ engagement.,Two experiments test the conceptual model and the proposed hypotheses. A field experiment uses real customer feedback gathered after interaction with the app-chat of a large telecommunications provider. It tests the effect of feedback timing on service employees’ performance and also examines the effect of feedback timing on their engagement. A subsequent scenario-based experiment then investigates the influence of selected moderators on the feedback timing–engagement relationship.,This article finds that real-time feedback leads to greater service performance than subsequent feedback. Furthermore, real-time feedback positively affects service employee engagement through the perceived controllability of the feedback and the service situation. Finally, feedback valence, task goals, individuals’ need for closure (NCL), and gender interact with feedback timing to influence employee engagement.,This research investigates the potential of real-time performance feedback for service firms, combines and extends a variety of literature streams, and provides recommendations for the future management of service employees.

中文翻译：

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测试实时绩效反馈对数字服务员工的影响

尽管数字媒体改变了服务上下文中通信的性质，通常允许客户与服务提供商立即进行交互，但是管理服务员工的含义和机会却广为人知。鉴于服务员工是服务公司成功的重要决定因素，这令人惊讶。本文研究了实时绩效反馈对员工服务绩效的影响，并研究了及时反馈如何以及在什么条件下及时鼓励员工参与。两个实验检验了概念模型和提出的假设。现场实验使用与大型电信提供商的应用程序聊天后收集的真实客户反馈。它测试了反馈时间对服务员工绩效的影响，还检查了反馈时间对员工敬业度的影响。然后，基于场景的后续实验研究了选定的主持人对反馈时间与参与关系的影响。本文发现，实时反馈比后续的反馈具有更好的服务性能。此外，实时反馈通过感知到的反馈和服务状况的可控制性对服务员工的敬业度产生积极影响。最后，反馈价，任务目标，个人的结业需求（NCL）和性别与反馈时间相互作用，以影响员工敬业度。本研究调查了服务公司实时绩效反馈的潜力，结合并扩展了各种文学流