Scenario
Imagine that you are a manager in a local restaurant. There are many restaurants in town, making it a competitive business. You recognise that providing high quality, friendly service and having actively engaged employees is going to make the difference between your restaurant’s success and failure. Your management team decides to first address organisational citizenship and employee engagement as drivers of high-quality customer service.
Introduction
Every organization aims to make a productive workplace to enable the best customer services in the competitive market. The purpose is to achieve and nurture a competitive advantage in the market. In terms of a local restaurant, there is always a need to develop the employee’s behavior, which can set the foundation for the competitive advantage. The most important thing is identifying destructive behavior and shaping effective engagement strategies to get things in favor. Based on the identification and navigation of employee’s destructive and dysfunctional behavior in the workplace, some useful strategies and recommendations are to be embellished.
Intensifying the Engagement and Citizenship Behaviors
The first task to be completed in the restaurant is to magnify employee engagement perceptibility. Some key initiatives can be streamlined by the management to make the difference. For example, the first thing that a company can do is to empower flexibility. It seems a relevant act because flexibility steadily reduces gaps between employees and managers. Flexibility in the workplace can help employees manage time in the workplace and get close to the management. The appropriate trait for the management is to ensure flexible working hours. By enabling flexibility in the workplace, management and employee can create the space to collaborate and identify the need for new behaviors and traits. On the other hand, job satisfaction and organizational commitment are two significant factors or aspects which can permit citizenship behavior in the internal business environment. For instance, making the working environment charming and warm, strengthening the reward systems, and incredible engagement of employees can set the foundation for job satisfaction and organizational commitment. These two elements can intensify citizenship behavior, as they will be in a better position to show assertiveness and work in the company’s best interest. It seems the employee’s loyalty and Belongings in the restaurant, which can justify citizenship behavior. Training and development are two critical factors that can improve employee citizenship. Of course, employees will be developing their skills in collaboration. In short, it can be said that employees will be able to collaborate at any level without dismantling their ability to work in different teams. The citizenship behavior of employees in the workplace can be magnified through adequate support of the company’s leaders. Due to the leader’s support and engagement, employees can inspire learning and act what is always expected at the top level. Consequently, it can be said that leadership support is one of the main drivers of employee engagement and citizenship behavior, and it can also be applied in this restaurant (Lin et al., 2010).
Dysfunctional employees’ behavior is in the spotlight in the workplace, particularly in this restaurant. Dysfunctional employee behavior is a kind of violation of all standards and norms in the company. The restaurant management decided how to get rid of this dysfunctional employee behavior and get things in favor. For instance, one of the pre-eminent employees dysfunctional behaviors are aggressiveness. The aggressiveness in the restaurants always ruins the internal operations, including customer services. This behavior shows how employees contain negative behavior in the workplace, especially when using resources. Interestingly, narcissism and lack of credibility are identified by the restaurant’s management, and these are to be eliminated in the workplace. Consequently, the best way to remove this dysfunctional behavior of employees in the workplace is to shape and implement the primary prevention strategy. In this particular strategy, the company’s management will be in a better position to get rid of unfavorable traits. From the hiring, the restaurant can present these traits, which can set the foundation for productive behavior. The restaurant can use a 360-degree assessment system to assess or evaluate the employees in the workplace, notably in the customer services section. The organization’s ultimate goal is to improve customer services, and the prevention of these traits from the beginning and 360 assessment is a strategy. The restaurant management can tell employees that particular work and customer service norms cannot be compromised at any cost, as it is also the main driver of job stability. Another portion to dismantle the dysfunctional work behavior is to shape and implement secondary prevention. For instance, there is a need to identify these toxic traits or behaviors early in the restaurant. After identifying these toxic behaviors and the impact on workplace and customer services, several actions such as training and development, coaching, and education can be taken. Secondary prevention is one of the best strategies to dismantle the dysfunctional behavior, as it involves employee engagement with the internal business environment. It is a fact that the employee’s dysfunctional behavior can become more toxic if primary and secondary prevention seems flat. If both primary and secondary prevention fails, territory prevention comes into life. It is all about terminating or letting employees go before more damage due to dysfunctional and toxic behavior. Getting rid of these employees and hiring new ones is the best strategy to be shaped and implemented in the last phase of dysfunctional behavior prevention in the restaurant (Gong & Chen-Ya, 2019).
Dysfunctional Behaviors that Should be Minimized
There are several dysfunctional behaviors, which should be minimized by company management. For instance, one of the striking dysfunctional behaviors is withdrawing support for juniors and seniors. In the customer service process, employees may break the rules or violate principles of mutual support, which is quite destructive to the customer service process and the whole workplace. Withholding the information in the company, primarily in the customer services, is also a leading dysfunctional because, which is to be minimized, intentionally, the employees may hide or withhold the information regarding customers or work to get personal benefits. It is a kind of behavior, which is depicted to be preventive in the workplace. But it is destructive for the company, and it should be minimized. In restaurants where dynamic customer services are always needed, everyone wants to take the credit and get rewards to form both management and customers. For instance, taking undue credit in the company is a kind of dysfunctional behavior that can even destroy or wreck the strong teams that are working to improve customer services. In the conventional organizational and restaurant culture, employees usually do not focus on quality, as they just want to get rid of the work and get paid by the company. Quality is the core of customer services, as this dysfunctional behavior can ruin the whole customer service process. Two dysfunctional behaviors, such as narcissism and aggressiveness, which have been mentioned in the above section, are also minimized. For instance, aggressiveness can ruin customer services and other work tasks or processes, as it leads to negative thinking, as when providing customer services, excessive resources can be utilized. It can also be said that the aggressiveness can also compel employees to violate the customer service norms or standards set by the restaurant to retain customers and enhance satisfaction. Narcissism is also a dysfunctional behavior, as all employees prefer their benefits and interests instead of prioritizing the firm’s image and success. It is a selfishness in the workplace that is to be minimized by implementing some critical strategies illustrated in the above section (Braje et al., 2020).
Minimize the Occurrence of these Destructive Behaviors
The occurrence of destructive behavior in the workplace is quite apparent, and the restaurant management has to get rid of it. Destructive behavior is a violation of the corporation’s legitimate interest by undermining or damaging goals and objectives. Destructive behavior is to be identified and eliminated at any cost to sustain the business functions adequately. Company management can start from the beginning to get rid of the workplace employee destructive behavior. It has to hire the right people with the correct values and attitudes. For instance, in the hiring process, the company’s management has to identify people who can be aligned with the customer services process incredibly. From the start, customer services and workplace values and attitudes are to be accepted, and it seems a primary driver of employee performance. The second strategy to get rid of destructive behavior is to establish or introduce behavior-based performance management. Instead of just focusing on the task and results, employees must be assessed by navigating the behavior. It is all about enabling behavioral-based assessment, which can force employees to stick to the expected behavior in the workplace, particularly when intending to provide high-quality and differentiated customer services. Giving rewards such as incentives and promotions against consistent or predictable behavior at all levels of organizations can also increase the assertiveness to work in the corporation’s best interest. Customer services and top management leaders have to model the behavior they want to see on the company’s bottom line, especially in the customer services department, to make the organization successful. Based on the customer service standards and workplace norms, these leaders or managers can represent the same behavior at both the top and bottom levels. It is all about inspiring employees in the workplace to adopt behavior that prevents the corporation from form possible customer service failures. When modeling the behavior, leaders and managers have to paint how to deal with customers, collaborate with other employees, make decisions, communicate, and act according to the situation. Modeling or behavior is a kind of direction to the employees from the top management, coaches, or consultants, which can work for both organizational and customer service success. It is a fact that not all employees contain destructive or toxic behavior in the workplace. The restaurant management has to pick up top performances from the customer service section and reinforce the same behavior. It is all about enabling positive reinforcement to inspire other employees. Eventually, to be conducted by the professional customer service consultants or experts, the training session is an excellent strategy to develop behavior and increase the capability of employees to make the restaurant successful in the contentious landscape. It is paramount to enable the competitive advantage, sourced from the excellence of customer service (He et al., 2019).
Top Three Suggestions/Recommendations for the Restaurant to Succeed
Three recommendations for the success of the restaurant are quite apparent. The first recommendation for the restaurant is to make the management ability respond to the behavior consistently. Customer services and many other business functions invariably contain some loopholes that can ruin or impair the behaviors. The best thing the company can do is to establish multiple behavior checks, mainly in customer services, and it can keep excellent or specific behavior in the loop (Zhou & Zhang, 2017).
The second recommendation for the restaurant is to hire an external customer service consultant or expert. The most important thing is to make adequate or broad knowledge regarding engagement, behavior, and customer service available to employees and managers. It can set the foundation for new standards or behaviors.
Conclusively, the third recommendation is to conduct the active training sessions and introduce the team-building culture. When establishing the team-building culture, the employee vulnerability to dysfunctional or destructive behavior can be eliminated or diminished (Thacker & Holl, 2008).
Conclusion
In the end, it concludes that the restaurant has got the potential to get things in favor and enable high quality and competitive customer services. The elimination of dysfunctional and destructive behavior is the primary driver of this improved business outcome. In this extensive study, the weight was on the perceptibility of dysfunctional and destructive behavior in the restaurant and its impact on customer services. After the identification of loopholes, strategies to eradicate dysfunctional and destructive behavior are explained along with many insights. Subsequently, some essential recommendations are also enlisted for the restaurants. These are strategic recommendations that can be improved or changed over time due to new customer services and workplace trends in the restaurant industry.
References
Braje, I.N., Aleksić, A. & Jelavić, S.R., 2020. Blame It on Individual or Organization Environment: What Predicts Workplace Deviance More? Social Sciences, 9(9), p.99.
Gong, T. & Chen-Ya, W., 2019. How does dysfunctional customer behavior affect employee turnover? Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 29(3), pp.329-52.
He, P., Peng, Z., Zhao, H. & Estay, C., 2019. How and When Compulsory Citizenship Behavior Leads to Employee Silence: A Moderated Mediation Model Based on Moral Disengagement and Supervisor–Subordinate Guanxi Views. Journal of Business Ethics, 155(1), pp.259-74.
Lin, C.-p. et al., 2010. Modeling Corporate Citizenship and Its Relationship with Organizational Citizenship Behaviors. Journal of Business Ethics, 95(3), pp.357-72.
Thacker, R.A. & Holl, K.B., 2008. Behaviorally based management training: linking behaviors to employee satisfaction. Industrial and Commercial Training, 40(2), pp.102-08.
Zhou, C. & Zhang, H., 2017. Exploring the Influence of Customer Participation on Employee Service Innovation Behavior: The Mediating Effect of Customer Psychological Empowerment and the Moderating Effect of Organizational Innovation Climate. Revista de Cercetare si Interventie Sociala, 57(1), pp.159-81.
