Where do workers find meaning in frontline foodservice and retail jobs? These jobs are known for their low wages, lack of benefits, and schedule instability coupled with routinized interactions, service with a forced smile, and an employer who is seemingly cutting costs without any concern for worker well-being. To better understand where workers might find meaning in these jobs, this dissertation looks to workplace relationships, how they factor into job evaluations, and the extent to which organizational concerns color these relationships. Specifically, the dissertation studies relationships among frontline workers and their customers, as well as relationships among coworkers.
This dissertation draws on two novels datasets: job reviews posted on Glassdoor.com, and a survey fielded using Facebook advertisements. From both datasets, I sample 10 foodservice and retail companies, collecting both quantitative data and open-ended text responses. To analyze the data, I conduct qualitative and computational text analysis, in addition to regression analysis.
In the first empirical chapter, I study how workers incorporate descriptions of relationships with their customers into written job evaluations in order to understand what these relationships mean to workers. I find that frontline workers evaluate customer interactions in three ways: as an inescapable occupational hazard or benefit, as a source of intrinsic satisfaction, or as the result of organizational strategies. Next, I find that frontline workers' job satisfaction and turnover intentions are more highly associated with agreement or disagreement with organizational strategies regarding customers than with other common ways of theorizing customer interactions. Importantly, this chapter shows that workers care about their customers and how the organization treats their customers.
In the second empirical chapter, I measure the extent to which relationships with customers influence workers' desires to conduct emotional labor, provide high quality customer service, and make the job satisfying. I do so by first measuring how workers perceived their workplace relationships as changing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that while respondents report that relationships with coworkers and supervisors generally stayed the same during the pandemic, relationships with customers deteriorated dramatically. I then use this deterioration in the quality of customer relationships as an independent variable. I find that a decline in relationships with customers is associated with more difficulty conducting emotional labor, less investment in producing a positive customer service experience, lower job satisfaction, and higher turnover intentions. These results provide new insight into the centrality of positive customer relationships for job quality and organizational efficiency in the service sector.
In the final empirical chapter, I turn to the topic of coworkers. This chapter asks, how are workers impacted by their perceptions of how their company treats coworkers in relation to themselves. This chapter evaluates work schedule quality as a job characteristic that workers draw upon as a source of comparison. I first establish through an analysis of free-text responses that frontline workers have multiple pathways to access information regarding coworkers' schedules. Next, I find that frontline workers are more likely to compare schedule quality to their coworkers and compare wages to other employers. I hypothesize that this difference may be in part due to the high visibility of schedules in the workplace. Further, I find evidence of steep declines in schedule satisfaction, overall job satisfaction, and increases in turnover intentions when frontline workers feel they have worse schedules than their coworkers. In contrast, I find limited evidence for small to modest improvements when workers feel they are treated better than average.
Together, these three chapters demonstrate the complexities of workplace relationships in foodservice and retail, but also the meaning that relationships bring to work. They highlight that relationships matter to workers' subjective well-being, turnover intentions, and desire to perform the job well. Additionally, these chapters show that workers are alert to how their employer treats customers and coworkers. Workers notice what their managers are doing, and they are concerned about how it affects themselves and others. Workers want to feel as though their company cares about them and the work that they're doing. When workers interpret managerial decisions as evidence that the company does not care about them or their work, workers are worse off. While such decisions may benefit companies in the short term, cutting costs at the expense of customer service and schedule stability may cause higher turnover and less satisfied customers, impacting organizational efficiency and profits in the long run. The findings from this dissertation advance multiple fields of sociological theory, including theories of social comparisons, schedule quality, stratification, emotional labor, and intrinsic satisfaction at work.
