9. General discussion
9.1. Theoretical implications
Although OCB is often conceptually grounded within social exchange theory (Bettencourt et al., 2005; Nielsen et al., 2009) to understand why employees engage in OCB, the current study draws from social role theory (Eagly and Wood, 2011) to help clarify how customers react to service-oriented OCB tied to gender-roles stereotypes. Specifically, the current study argued that the effect of service-oriented OCB on customer reactions might depend on what type of service-oriented OCB is performed and on the customer's gender. Study 1 showed that the type of service-oriented OCB performed by a female employee interacts with the customer’s gender. Although both male and female customers recognized the agentic OCB, female customers were found to significantly rate the communal OCB higher (i.e., positive behavioral intentions and customer evaluations of service employee performance) than male customers. In Study 2, the male and female customers had equal evaluations for the male employee performing both service-oriented OCB. Taken together, Study 1 and 2 showed that the interaction effect between the service-oriented OCB type (communal versus agentic) and customer gender only influences customer reactions for female employees, but not for male employees.
