The Role of Employee Attachment in Creating Service Climate: A Low-Skilled Workers’ Perspective: An Abstract

This interdisciplinary study combines insights from attachment theory, services research, and organizational management to investigate how a Chinese restaurant chain creates a strong service climate by satisfying emotional attachment needs of low-skilled employees. Employee attachment has been used extensively to predict employees’ attitudes and behaviors (Wang et al. 2018), which are important for service climate (Hong et al. 2013). Despite the importance of attachment to understand employees’ attitudes, behavior and positive service climate, the use of attachment theory in services research is still recent. Scholars identify the need to understand the antecedents of service climate (Bowen and Schneider 2014). Specifically, how employees bond with co-workers to align their personal goals with those of the organization (Tang et al. 2014), how these bonds relate to social stressors (such as those caused by supervisors or colleagues), and the impact on service climate. This understanding is relevant in the context of low-skilled Chinese workers moving from the countryside to the city, leaving their families behind, and facing adaptation difficulties, which in turn activates their attachment system.