Sijun Wang, Sharon E.

Beatty, & Jeanny Liu

Employees’ Decision Making in the

Face of Customers’ Fuzzy Return
Requests
Frontline service employees frequently encounter customers’ fuzzy requests, defined as requests that are slightly
or somewhat outside company policy but not completely unacceptable or detrimental to the company. Employees’
compliance decisions can profoundly affect customers, organizations, and employees themselves. However, the
complex decision process in which service employees engage is largely unexplored. The authors draw from script
and motivated reasoning theories, as well as qualitative interviews, to model employees’ responses to customers’
fuzzy requests in a retail setting. The results, which are based on a national survey of retail employees, indicate
that employees with higher customer orientation and higher conflict avoidance tend to handle fuzzy return requests
in a friendlier, more effortful manner, especially when customers demonstrate an affiliative style. In contrast, when
customers display a dominant style, employees engage in motivated reasoning and perceive the request to be less
legitimate, reducing their likelihood of complying. In addition, the employees’ perceived flexibility influences their
compliance decisions, but punishment expectations do not. The authors conclude with some managerial
implications, including better identification of these requests and more training of employees to handle them
appropriately.

T
Keywords: fuzzy requests, compliance, script theory, role theory, motivated reasoning, retail returns, legitimacy

he marketing literature has long recognized the impor-
tant roles of frontline employees in service delivery
and recovery (e.g., Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault
1990; Schneider 1991). According to Langeard et al.’s
(1981) Servuction Service Model, the quality of service
performance depends on the interaction and performance of
three key players in the delivery process: the service organi-
zation system, the contact employee, and the customer. In
this relationship, customers are motivated to compete with
the firm and its employees to seize control of the service
process to increase their utility and personal satisfaction
(Bateson 1985). One way customers do this is by asking for
special requests that require the employee or the firm to
adapt the service to these requests (Bitner, Booms, and
Tetreault 1990).
Some requests greatly deviate from the normal service
scope and employee expectations, while others are routine,
such as a customer asking the host to seat his or her party at
Sijun Wang is Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing
a table with a view. While some requests may be innocent
problems (e.g., returning a failed product bought from the
store), others may involve intentionally taking advantage of
a service provider (e.g., returning a dress after wearing it for
a special occasion [e.g., Schmidt et al. 1999]).
In contrast to both the common organization assumption
that customers are always right (e.g., Ringberg, Odekerken-
Schroder, and Christensen 2007) and the emphasis in cur-
rent literature on problem or fraudulent customers, in which
customers or their actions are completely wrong (e.g., Har-
ris 2010), many customers’ requests lie between these
extremes. These requests often are somewhat or slightly
outside company policy, not addressed by company policy,
or outside the employee’s job description or job expecta-
tions, but they are not unacceptable or detrimental to the
company. We label these requests as “fuzzy requests,”
implying that how and what employees should do regarding
these requests are not always clear.
Although the marketing literature has not identified or
examined employees’ reactions to customers’ fuzzy requests,
their occurrence is unquestionable; many excellent service

firms, such as Ritz-Carlton and the Mayo Clinic, focus on

and Business Law, College of Business Administration, Loyola Marymount

meeting unconventional or unexpected customer requests

University (e-mail: swang15@lmu.edu). Sharon E. Beatty is Reese Phifer

(Berry and Bendapudi 2003; Michel, Bowen, and Johnston

Professor of Marketing, Department of Management and Marketing, Cul-

2008). Furthermore, several studies indicate the ubiquity of

verhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration, University

these incidents and their challenges to frontline employees

of Alabama (sbeatty@cba.ua.edu). Jeanny Liu is Assistant Professor of
Marketing, College of Business & Public Management, University of La

(e.g., Beatty et al. 1996; Bitner, Booms, and Mohr 1994). In

Verne (e-mail: jliu@laverne.edu). The authors gratefully acknowledge the

contrast to the strong presence of fuzzy requests in the mar-

comments and suggestions provided by the following people on previous

ketplace, a Strativity Group (2008) survey shows that only

versions of this article: Rich Lutz, Mark Arnold, Gianfranco Walsh, and

29% of executives believe that employees have the tools

Mark Leach. In addition, they acknowledge the helpful comments from the
three anonymous JM reviewers.

© 2012, American Marketing Association Journal of Marketing

ISSN: 0022-2429 (print), 1547-7185 (electronic) 69 Volume 76 (November 2012), 69–86
and authority to solve customer problems and to delight
customers.
The current study focuses on a specific type of customer
fuzzy request: fuzzy return requests in a retail context.
While retail returns were reported to reach 8.9% of all
goods sold in a year and merchandise returned to stores
reached $217 billion in 2011, only 6.6% of these returns
were considered fraudulent returns (National Retail Federa-
tion 2011). Thus, a significant proportion of customer
return requests are likely to be classified as fuzzy return
requests (i.e., outside policy but not completely unaccept-
able or fraudulent1), as evidenced by 19.7% of returns
being made without receipts, even though almost every
retailer requires a receipt as proof of purchase (National
Retail Federation 2011). When customers present a fuzzy
return request to a contact employee, the employee must
decide on the spot whether and how to comply with this
request, while taking into account several important issues
and concerns instantaneously. What drives a contact
employee’s approach and decision making when dealing
with such a customer request? What are the important fac-
tors affecting how he or she chooses to handle these
requests and whether he or she decides to bend the rules
(i.e., comply or not)? Understanding employee decision
making regarding these important decisions is critical to
firms in their efforts to manage service encounters effec-
tively (Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault 1990).
In addressing these questions, our study makes several
important contributions. First, we model contact employees’
compliance decisions (both compliance process and out-
come) with regard to customers’ fuzzy return requests, the
first such attempt in the literature. Noting that compliance
behaviors should be studied from both process and outcome
perspectives, we identify antecedents relevant to the compli-
ance behaviors of frontline employees. In particular, while
much research effort has focused on customers’ reactions/
perceptions to employee behaviors in service encounters
(e.g., Mohr and Bitner 1995; Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and
Berry 1985), our study sheds light on how and what condi-
tions are conducive to contact employees acting in certain
ways toward customers. In the context of fuzzy return
requests, which conceptually resemble a service failure or
customer complaint encounter, we find that employees with
higher customer orientation (CO) and higher conflict avoid-
ance (CA) tend to handle customers’ fuzzy requests in a
friendlier, more effortful manner, especially when cus-
tomers demonstrate a more affiliative interaction style dur-
ing the encounter. In terms of the actual outcome, we find
that employees are more likely to comply with fuzzy
requests when they have more flexibility but that punish-
ment expectations do not influence these decisions.
Furthermore, a customer’s dominant style reduces the
employee’s perceptions of the request’s legitimacy and his
or her willingness to comply with it. Differential findings
regarding customers’ affiliative versus dominant styles
enrich the literature based on script theory and motivated
1We do not include requests outside the employee’s job descrip-
tion as part of customer return requests, because these requests are
likely to be part of the frontline employee’s job description.
70 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012
reasoning theory (Kunda 1990). Finally, we find that
employee gender and organizational tenure moderate sev-
eral key relationships in the model. The findings of this
study offer significant managerial insights for service orga-
nizations with regard to employees’ compliance decisions
with customers’ fuzzy return requests. We first discuss our
qualitative work and literature review; then, the model and
hypotheses; and finally, the study procedure and findings.
Theory Building and Hypotheses
Qualitative Research and Theory Development
The qualitative research consisted of 21 in-depth interviews
with a group of customer service representatives from a
variety of retailers, ranging from one-store, family-owned
shops to national chain retailers. In our interviews, we
asked informants to recall several return incidents in which
the customer’s return request was outside the store policy
but not completely unacceptable or fraudulent. In the inter-
views, informants elaborated on why they chose to comply
or not comply with these requests. Informants had no trou-
ble retrieving one or more return incidents falling into our
definition of a fuzzy request. The average length of the
interviews was 90 minutes.
Following Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) recommendations,
we first analyzed interview transcripts, preparing memos for
each. Then, we reviewed and discussed the interviews and
notes extensively. We used open-coding methods to identify
concepts with common properties and dimensions. We then
clustered data pertaining to the same category together and
developed a set of antecedents relative to employee’s com-
pliance behavior (with a customer’s fuzzy return request).
We also conducted an extensive literature review focus-
ing on service quality issues (e.g., Parasuraman, Zeithaml,
and Berry 1985), service failure and recovery (e.g., Smith,
Bolton, and Wagner 1999), organizational behavior (e.g.,
Vecchio 1995), and communication (e.g., Webster and
Driskell 1983). This literature review and our qualitative
research led to the identification of four bundles of ante-
cedents important to compliance behavior: customer factors,
request factors, organizational factors, and several individual
difference factors of the employee (which we simply call
“employee factors”). Appendix A presents the list of con-
structs and example excerpts from the in-depth interviews.
Our model of employee compliance decision making is
a middle-range theory (Merton 1968), which falls between
substantive and more formal theories (Glaser and Strauss
1967). Our goal was to develop a framework through
grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1998) that represents
a view of the important variables and their interrelation-
ships relative to the topic.
Theoretical Background: Compliance Outcome
and Process
Researchers have paid little attention to compliance behav-
ior in marketing, and the term has widely varying meanings
(e.g., Joshi 2010; Payan and McFarland 2005). Our study
examines service employees’ compliance behavior with
respect to customers’ fuzzy return requests. By definition,
compliance is demonstrated when a party displays “overt
behavioral adherence” (Brill 1994, p. 212). Overt behav-
ioral adherence to a customer’s request (e.g., exchanging an
item, giving store credit or cash back), which is a compli-
ance outcome, is an important component of service
employees’ reactions to customers’ requests. Moreover, it is
equally important to understand how employees actually
interact (i.e., the compliance process) with the customer
during service encounters (Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault
1990); however, little research systematically studies what
drives these critical behaviors.
In the service encounter literature, researchers view ser-
vice quality as being composed of two dimensions: the ser-
vice outcome and service process (e.g., Mohr and Bitner
1995; Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1985). Broadly
speaking, the service outcome encompasses all results or
consequences associated with a service encounter, while the
service process refers to the way service transactions are
accomplished (Mohr and Bitner 1995). Similarly, service
recovery is understood to include both process and outcome
variables (e.g., Smith and Bolton 2002; Smith, Bolton, and
Wagner 1999). Researchers have connected process variables
to procedural and interactional justice and outcome variables
to distributive justice. Thus, distinguishing a compliance
outcome and compliance process behaviors is important.
For our study, “compliance outcome” is the extent to
which an employee believes that he or she has met the
expectations of the customer rather than simply whether the
return was accepted (e.g., a customer may want a refund but
the employee only provides store credit, thus not fully meet-
ing the customer’s expectations). Consistent with Mohr and
Bitner’s (1995) broader definition of service process, “com-
pliance process” is the way the employee handles the return
transaction and, for this study, is composed of two key
behavioral factors: effort and friendliness. Researchers have
consistently suggested that these factors are important com-
ponents of service delivery and/or the recovery process
(e.g., Hui et al. 2004; Mohr and Bitner 1995).
Employee effort. According to Mohr and Bitner (1995),
employee effort represents the amount of energy put into a
behavior or series of behaviors. Customers, as observers in
the service encounter, use employee effort to derive their
attribution of the service experience, as well as their percep-
tions of the service quality of the firm and their satisfaction
with the experience. As Mohr and Bitner (1995, p. 242)
note, “when a service outcome is favorable, a high level of
employee effort may enhance satisfaction; on the other
hand, when the customer does not get the desired outcome,
a low level of employee effort may cause additional aggra-
vation to an already unsatisfactory encounter.”
Employee friendliness. Emotional contagion unques-
tionably exists in customer–employee encounters. This
theory suggests that employee friendliness is an important
component of the customers’ overall experience. Indeed,
research in the communication field indicates that employ-
ees’ friendly, helpful styles elicit greater customer satisfac-
tion with the employee and firm (e.g., Buller and Buller
1987), and researchers link it to the service recovery
process (Blodgett, Hill, and Tax 1997; Hui et al. 2004).
Script Theory and Overview of Framework
Role and script theories explain many frontline employees’
behaviors (e.g., Walker, Churchill, and Ford 1975). In an
organizational context, an employee’s role is his or her per-
ceptions of what the role senders expect of the employee.
Role senders, such as organizations (e.g., supervisors,
coworkers) and customers, provide input to individuals,
allowing them to understand or interpret their roles more
accurately. In particular, service firms use service scripts to
standardize customer–firm interactions. However, in our
study context, organizations have difficulty prescribing
exactly how an employee should handle a customer’s
request given the variance possible (Hartline and Ferrell
1996). Thus, the compliance process is largely discretionary
with regard to the employee’s interaction with a customer
involving a fuzzy request (Blancero and Johnson 2001).
The employee–customer dyad interaction affects how
the employee handles the return given the proximal one-on-
one contact involved. Thus, customer interaction style
(affiliation) and several employee factors (e.g., CO, CA)
should jointly determine the employee’s level of effort and
friendliness with regard to the request (see Figure 1).
In contrast to the processing of the return request, the
employee’s decision making with regard to complying with
the request (i.e., compliance outcome) is scripted more eas-
ily and involves less discretionary behavior. Therefore, the
expectations of relevant role senders, including the organi-
zation and the customer, along with the employee’s percep-
tions of the specific request (and its legitimacy), will jointly
influence the extent to which an employee fulfills the
request (though employee factors will not play a significant
role). Thus, our model indicates that a customers’ interac-
tion style (affiliation), the legitimacy of the request, and
several organizational factors (both formal and informal)
produce the employee’s compliance outcome. We discuss
the antecedents for the compliance process and compliance
outcome next.
Employee Factors
As we noted previously, employee factors are important dri-
vers of the discretionary compliance process (Hartline and
Ferrell 1996). An increasing number of studies consistently
show that employees with certain individual difference
characteristics display common behaviors when delivering
customer service (e.g., Auh et al. 2011). Thus, on the basis
of our qualitative work and literature review, two important
individual difference variables emerged as important in the
context of this study: CO and CA. The following subsec-
tions elaborate on these variables.
Customer orientation (CO). Brown et al. (2002, p. 111)
define employees’ CO as an “employee’s tendency or pre-
disposition to meet customer needs in an on-the-job con-
text.” It is positively related to customer satisfaction (e.g.,
Reynierse and Harker 1992), worker performance (Brown
et al. 2002), and job responses. Compared with employees
with lower CO, employees with higher CO are more intrin-
sically motivated to make customers happy and to go the
extra mile to meet their needs (Brown et al. 2002). Thus,
Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests / 71
 FIGURE 1
Employee Compliance Decision-Making Model
Emp
Employee
loyee F
Factors
actors
• Customer Orientation
• Conflict Avoidance
C
Customer
ustomer IInteraction
nteraction S
Styles
tyles
Affiliation
Dominance
O rganizational F
Organizational actors
Factors H4a-c
• Norm of Flexibility
• !
Punishment Expectations
employees with higher CO will work harder to please the
customer, regardless of the compliance outcome.
H1a: There is a positive relationship between an employee’s
CO and his or her friendliness and effort in handling the
fuzzy request (i.e., compliance process behaviors).
Conflict avoidance (CA). Researchers in psychology
have extensively studied CA, which is an attempt to protect
the self from conflict, disapproval, and negative attention
(Rahim 1983). People who have a CA personality prefer not
to assert themselves to preserve rapport and smooth rela-
tionships with others (Schroeder 1965). Oddly enough,
although marketers have studied group CA in the context of
marketing strategy decision making (Atuahene-Gima and
Murray 2004), researchers have not linked individual
employees’ CA to their handling of customer complaints or
requests (including return requests). Yet in our qualitative
interviews, informants frequently talked about trying to
avoid arguments with customers if possible. Thus, a posi-
tive relationship between an employee’s tendency to avoid
conflicts and his or her compliance process is likely:
H1b: There is a positive relationship between an employee’s
CA and his or her friendliness and effort in handling the
fuzzy request (i.e., compliance process behaviors).
Customer Interaction Styles
The social interaction model (Ben-Sira 1980) identifies two
major interaction styles: affiliation and dominance. An affil-
iative style parallels Norton’s (1978) communication styles,
72 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012
Compliance
Compliance Be
Behaviors
haviors
H1
Compliance
Process
H2
R equest Le
Request gitimacy
Legitimacy
H3
• Regulative
•H3 Normative H5 Compliance
• Cognitive Outcome
H6
such as attentiveness, relaxed, open, and friendly styles. In
the context of an employee–customer interaction, “affilia-
tive style” refers to the employee’s perception that a cus-
tomer engages with him or her in a warm, friendly manner.
In contrast, “dominant style” refers to the employee’s per-
ception that a customer is trying to control or dominate the
interaction. Emotional contagion theory (Hatfield, Cacioppo,
and Rapson 1994) proposes a direct link between employee
and customer by affective transfer during interpersonal con-
tact. In the service encounter literature, Dallimore, Sparks,
and Butcher (2007) demonstrate that angry customers often
produce similar facial displays and affective states in ser-
vice workers through an emotional contagion process. In an
even broader sense, each party of the client–service
provider dyad influences the other party’s behavior (Ma and
Dubé 2011). For example, Webster (2005) finds that a cus-
tomer evaluates an employee with a more affiliative style
more favorably and is more satisfied, whereas an employee
displaying more dominance receives less favorable cus-
tomer evaluations (Korsch and Negrete 1972). While cus-
tomer interaction styles have not been associated with
employee reactions to customers, given the dyadic, interac-
tive nature of customer–employee dyads, the findings
between employee interaction styles and customer evalua-
tions should work in reverse. That is, the employee is likely
to more positively handle the request (i.e., compliance
process) when the customer approaches him or her with a
friendly, warm manner.
H2: The employee’s perceptions of the customer’s affiliative
style are related positively to his or her friendliness and
 effort in handling the fuzzy request (i.e., compliance
process behaviors).
In addition, the employee who perceives that a customer
is being friendly and warm is more likely to comply with
the customer’s request. This proposition lies in the similar
logic of interdependency between customer and employee
(or an echoing effect) as Ma and Dubé (2011) report. This
idea follows from the work of Cialdini (2001), who sug-
gests liking as an important persuasive tool. That is, the
employee likes the customer more (due to emotional conta-
gion) and so may be more willing to comply.
H3: The employee’s perceptions of the customer’s affiliative
style are related positively to his or her likelihood to com-
ply relative to the customer’s fuzzy request (i.e., his or her
compliance outcome).
In contrast, when a customer uses a dominant approach,
the employee will need to regulate his or her outward reac-
tions to such an approach, reducing the likelihood that he or
she will show anger or dismay in the situation. Thus, the
echoing effect occurring when the customer uses an affilia-
tive approach is not likely to hold when the customer
approaches the employee in a dominant manner. Recent
theorizing in dual process models has suggested that people
will engage in various defense mechanisms to cope with
uncomfortable or negative situations. As part of that
process, people rely on selective information and heuristics
that help them reach a desirable conclusion while discount-
ing heuristics that endorse the opposing view (e.g., Giner-
Sorolla and Chaiken 1997). Researchers refer to this goal-
directed process as “motivated reasoning” (Kunda 1990). In
our study context, when an employee perceives that a cus-
tomer is displaying a dominant style, which will tend to
make an employee uncomfortable, the employee may be
motivated to discount the positive or even objective aspects
of the fuzzy request (i.e., engage in biased, motivated rea-
soning). As a result, the employee will perceive the request
as less legitimate (i.e., farther away from policies and/or
less acceptable to the company). Such an unfavorable judg-
ment of the request’s legitimacy allows the employee to
decline the request more easily, which would be more
preferable to him or her. In contrast, when a customer
adopts an affiliative style, the motivated reasoning process
is not triggered (i.e., legitimacy perceptions are not invoked
as a justification for their behaviors); rather, as we noted
previously, behavior is directly affected (i.e., the compli-
ance process and outcome). We now turn to a discussion of
legitimacy.
Legitimacy of the Request
Employees’ judgments of the request’s legitimacy are
important because their interpretation of the request vis à
vis their interpretation of company policy is the driving
force behind their reactions to these requests. Previous stud-
ies on retail returns show the important role of legitimacy in
employee’s interpretations and reactions, though researchers
have generally defined and measured it simplistically (e.g.,
Autry, Hill, and O’Brien 2007; Krapfel 1988).
Unless a return meets all requirements of store policy,
the employee will need to judge whether the request is cred-
ible, desirable, and reasonable. Consistent with Autry, Hill,
and O’Brien (2007) and Krapfel (1988), legitimacy draws
from institutional theory and represents the extent to which
an employee perceives that a return complies with regulatory,
normative, and cognitive expectations (Meyer and Zucker
1989). Thus, legitimacy encompasses three dimensions:
regulative, normative, and cognitive legitimacy. “Regula-
tive legitimacy” refers to the conformance of the request to
established return policies and procedures (i.e., whether the
return request falls within the return period, conditions, and
terms set by the retailer). This type of legitimacy is closest
to the idea of whether it is or is not a fuzzy request. “Nor-
mative legitimacy” addresses whether the return request
conforms to commonly held social values and norms of
acceptable behavior. “Cognitive legitimacy” refers to the
appropriateness, interpretability, and comprehensibility of
the return request (i.e., whether it makes sense). The
employee must judge the legitimacy of the customer’s
claim according to the rationale the customer offers when
returning a product, the condition of the product, and other
contextual factors, such as price and the resale ability of the
item.
Although legitimacy has been studied in the context of
returns in retailing (e.g., Autry, Hill, and O’Brien 2007;
Krapfel 1988) and other customer–employee interaction
contexts (e.g., Hui, Au, and Fock 2004a, b), an accurate
understanding of legitimacy and its impact on employees’
decisions is still missing. For example, Hui, Au, and Fock
(2004a, b) address only cognitive legitimacy, finding a posi-
tive relationship between service-return legitimacy and
employee compliance intention. In contrast, Krapfel (1988,
see p. 189), focusing on normative legitimacy, reports a
positive link between return request legitimacy and
employee attitude toward the customer. Finally, Autry, Hill,
and O’Brien (2007) and O’Brien, Hill, and Autry (2009)
use single items for the three legitimacy aspects in their
studies on retail return episodes and the impact of legiti-
macy on employee attitude formation and role conflict.
Thus, given the inconsistent findings and weak measure-
ment issues in this area, further examination of the role of
legitimacy in employees’ compliance decisions is worth-
while.
Even though no previous research examines the impact
of legitimacy on actual behavior, it is clear from the previous
research and logic that when an employee calls into question
the legitimacy of the request (relative to any aspect), the
employee is less likely to comply with the request. Combin-
ing the previously mentioned arguments and the theory of
motivated reasoning, when a customer engages in a domi-
nant style in presenting a request, the employee will view
the request as less legitimate and be less likely to comply
with the request. Thus, legitimacy perceptions serve as a
mediating mechanism between a customer displaying a
dominant style and the employee’s compliance decision.
Furthermore, as we noted previously, the customer’s affilia-
tive style does not call into question the legitimacy of the
request (i.e., the employee does not engage in motivated rea-
soning); instead, the affiliative style of the customer directly
influences the employee’s compliance behaviors. The pre-
ceding discussion leads us to hypothesize the following:
Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests / 73
 H4(a–c): The employee’s perceptions of the customer’s domi-
nant style are related negatively to the employee’s per-
ceptions of the request’s (a) regulative legitimacy, (b)
normative legitimacy, and (c) cognitive legitimacy.
H4(d–f): The employee’s perceptions of the customer’s affilia-
tive style are not related to the employee’s perceptions
of the request’s (d) regulative legitimacy, (e) norma-
tive legitimacy, and (f) cognitive legitimacy.
H5: The employee’s perceptions of the (a) regulative legitimacy,
(b) normative legitimacy, and (c) cognitive legitimacy of
the request are related positively to his or her likelihood of
complying (i.e., his or her compliance outcome).
Organizational Factors
In addition to employees’ personal evaluative beliefs
regarding the customer and the request, the organization’s
formal and informal control systems also affect the
employee’s motivations and behaviors. An organization’s
formal control system is defined as the written procedures
and policies that direct employee behavior to achieve the
organization’s goals and/or detect misconduct (Leatherwood
and Lee 1991), whereas an informal system molds employee
behavior through common values, beliefs, and traditions
(Ouchi 1980). The informal control system allows employees
to develop responses to customers according to a maze of
unspoken and/or unwritten rules existing in the organization.
Our qualitative research uncovered both types of orga-
nizational control mechanisms. In particular, the employee’s
perceptions of the firm’s norms of flexibility are part of the
informal control system, while expectations of punishment
(for going outside company policy) are part of the formal
control system. Interestingly, this organizational classifica-
tion echoes Homburg and Furst’s (2005) ideas of mechanis-
tic versus organic. The expectation of punishment repre-
sents the mechanical guidelines, while the employee’s
perceptions of flexibility provide the organic environment
with regard to the employee’s responses.
Perceived norm of flexibility. The norm of flexibility
involves a management style that gives employees the dis-
cretion to make day-to-day or case-by-case decisions about
job-related activities (Heide and John 1992) and relates to
employee empowerment (Bowen and Lawler 1992).
Whereas previous researchers have addressed the influence
of empowerment on employee behavior (e.g., Hartline and
Ferrell 1996), we focus on the perceived norm of flexibility
to capture employees’ perceptions of how much freedom
they believe they have in handling customer requests day to
day, including fuzzy return requests. Chebat and Kollias
(2000) note that the increased discretion and flexibility
derived from more empowerment is positively associated
with an employee’s confidence in serving customers. Thus,
employees who believe that they have more flexibility in
their jobs are more likely to comply with fuzzy requests.
H6a: There is a positive relationship between an employee’s
perceived flexibility in handling customer requests and
his or her likelihood of complying with the fuzzy request
(i.e., his or her compliance outcome).
Expectations of punishment. Deterrence theory (Tittle
1980) posits that as punishment certainty and punishment
74 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012
severity increases, the level of illegal behavior should
decrease. In our study, the employee’s expectations of pun-
ishment capture his or her expectations of the negative con-
sequences of complying with a fuzzy request. In the organi-
zational behavior literature, reward/punishment systems are
strong communicators of desired behavior (Lawler 1987).
According to control theory, punishment influences and
shapes employee behavior (Jaworski 1988). Indeed,
employees’ punishment expectations have been linked to
reduction in various negative behaviors, such as software
piracy, computer abuse, and Internet misuse (Liao et al.
2010; Peace, Galletta, and Thong 2003; Straub 1990).
H6b: There is a positive relationship between an employee’s
expectations of punishment from complying with a fuzzy
request and his or her likelihood of complying with the
request (i.e., his or her compliance outcome).
As two interrelated aspects of a service encounter, com-
pliance outcome and process should also be interdependent.
From the event order perspective, employees may be likely
to decide on their compliance outcome (i.e., to what extent
customer expectations will be met) before they engage in
the process of compliance. This also follows according to
self-perception theory (Bem 1967). Therefore, we add a
link from compliance outcome to process in the model.
Because it is not particularly interesting, this link is a con-
trol relationship.
Moderating Effects of Employee Gender and
Organizational Tenure
The preceding discussion presents a set of linear relation-
ships to aid in predicting employees’ compliance behavior
with a fuzzy request. To enhance the managerial implica-
tions of this study, we address two highly relevant and
actionable moderators, employee gender and organizational
tenure, of some of the previously mentioned relationships.
Employee gender. Researchers often find gender differ-
ences in organizational settings, especially for service
employees (e.g., Babin and Boles 1998; Iacobucci and
Ostrom 1993). Employee gender influences how they inter-
act with customers, as well as their development and main-
tenance of customer relationships (e.g., Fiske and Stevens
1993; Iacobucci and Ostrom 1993). The most resilient sex
role difference is a gender-based difference in schema in
which men and women evaluate their own behaviors to reg-
ulate their attitudes and behaviors (Bem 1981). Men tend to
be assertive, task oriented, dominating, and authoritative
and exhibit independent construal; women tend to be pas-
sive, relationship oriented, submissive, and noncompetitive
(e.g., Fiske and Stevens 1993). Moreover, women tend to
maintain and nurture the interpersonal aspects of their rela-
tionships more than men and attempt to avoid conflicts
(Babin and Boles 1998). These sex role differences will
produce differential weights for some antecedents for male
versus female employees’ with regard to their compliance
process and outcome.
H7a: The relationship between CA and employees’ friendliness
and effort in handling the fuzzy request (i.e., compliance
process behaviors) is stronger for female employees than
for male employees.
 Furthermore, meta-analytic evidence (e.g., Taylor and
Hall 1982) suggests gender differences in the saliency of
instrumentality in decision-making processes; that is, society
socializes men to value the outcome, focusing more on instru-
mental behaviors and impersonal tasks and goals (Baird 1976;
Rotter and Portugal 1969). In contrast, women tend to focus
on the method used to accomplish a task, suggesting a
greater process orientation (Hennig and Jardim 1977;
Iacobucci and Ostrom 1993). Thus, the echoing effect of the
customer’s affiliative style may have a stronger effect on
what the employee focuses on most (i.e., process for women
and outcome for men), leading to the following hypotheses:
H7b: Female employees’ perception of the customer’s affilia-
tive style is related more strongly to their friendliness and
effort in handling the fuzzy request (i.e., compliance
process behaviors) than male employees’ perceptions.
H7c: Male employees’ perception of the customer’s affiliative
style is related more strongly to their likelihood to com-
ply with the fuzzy request (i.e., compliance outcome)
than female employees’ perceptions.
In addition, known gender differences involving com-
munication styles suggest that men tend to demonstrate
visual dominance and ignore communications of others
more so than women (e.g., Dovidio et al. 1988). Thus, male
employees are more likely to engage in dominant styles
themselves, which do not complement customers’ dominant
styles. Therefore, compared with women, men may react
more negatively and strongly to a customer acting in a dom-
inant manner (i.e., butting heads with the employee), thus
causing the male employee to engage in greater motivated
reasoning to decline the request.
H7(d–f): The employee’s perceptions of the customer’s domi-
nant style is related more strongly to the employee’s
perceptions of the request’s (d) regulative legitimacy,
(e) normative legitimacy, and (f) cognitive legitimacy
for male than for female employees.
Organizational tenure. “Organizational tenure” refers to
the length of time that an individual employee has worked
for the organization. A study of fraudulent consumers
reports that customers intentionally choose to return items
to younger employees because they believe that they are
less knowledgeable about return policies, less experienced,
and thus more accommodating to these requests (Harris
2010). Indeed, previous studies have shown that longer-
tenured employees have more learning and practice oppor-
tunities to engage in serving customers as job-related
knowledge increases (Schmidt, Hunter, and Outerbridge
1986). Such improved capacity may enhance their motiva-
tions for customer-oriented tasks, such as organizational cit-
izenship behaviors (e.g., helping customers and making
constructive suggestions), as evidenced by a recent meta-
analysis (Ng and Feldman 2010). Therefore, longer-tenured
employees, who need fewer cognitive resources to perform
their jobs, may have more resources available to initiate
their own actions and to engage in greater discretionary
efforts (e.g., Wang et al. 2011).Therefore, we hypothesize
the following:
H8a: The relationship between CO and an employee’s friendli-
ness and effort in handling the fuzzy request (i.e., com-
pliance process behaviors) is stronger for longer-tenure
employees than for shorter-tenure employees.
H8b: The relationship between CA and an employee’s friendli-
ness and effort in handling the fuzzy request (i.e., com-
pliance process behaviors) is stronger for longer-tenure
employees than for shorter-tenure employees.
In addition, as we reasoned previously, longer-tenured
employees should have larger resource endowments. These
endowments should enable them to engage in a more delib-
erate reasoning process (producing greater motivated rea-
soning) than shorter-term employees. Thus:
H8: The perception of the customer’s dominant style is related
more strongly to the employee’s perceptions of the
request’s (c) regulative legitimacy, (d) normative legiti-
macy, and (e) cognitive legitimacy for longer-tenure
employees than for shorter-tenure employees.
Control Variables
We exercise caution with regard to possible spurious and
attenuating variables that could influence our proposed rela-
tionships by incorporating several relevant covariates.
These covariates include employee demographics (age and
education), two company variables (type of retailer and
amount of returns training), and presence versus absence of
supervisor during the encounter.
Method
Sample
The sample consists of employees whose job duties include
handling customer returns in the retail industry in the
United States. We tested our conceptual framework in the
context of retail returns because of the ubiquity and rele-
vance of fuzzy requests in retail return encounters; how-
ever, the model could have broad applicability to fuzzy
requests beyond a returns situation.
The researchers recruited a web panel provided by
Qualtrics, an online survey hosting company that maintains
an online panel of approximately 53,000 retail employees in
the United States from all 50 states. For the current study,
Qualtrics randomly selected more than 3000 of these pan-
elists and invited them to answer the first screening ques-
tion: “Are you currently employed by a retailing company?”
One thousand sixty-six panelists responded “yes” to this
question. A second question asked, “Is it part of your job to
handle customer returns?” to which 811 panelists responded
“yes” and proceeded to the survey. Following the current
best practices of preventing respondent cheating in online
surveys (Rogers and Michael 2009), we dropped 369
respondents (i.e., did not allow them to continue responding
to survey questions and eliminated all their answers) due to
careless responding to the first attention-checking question,
and we dropped 31 more with the second attention-checking
question. Thus, the final sample included 411 respondents.
A wide variety of retailer types appear in the responses
provided by respondents, from image department stores
(23%) to specialty stores (15%), covering almost every cate-
gory of retailer. The respondents’ job titles were as follows:
Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests / 75
51% of respondents were sales associates/representatives,
35% were managers or supervisors, and the rest did not
indicate their position in the company. Approximately 30%
of respondents worked less than 30 hours a week (i.e., part-
time), and the rest worked full-time. The sample is skewed
in gender (69% female) due to the retail employment real-
ity. All age categories (approximately half younger than 40
years old), ethnicity (86% Caucasians), and education lev-
els (49% with some college education) are well represented
and similar to recent retail statistics (U.S. Census Bureau
2010). With regard to job tenure, 63% had worked for their
current retail firm for fewer than five years, while the rest
had worked for the firm for more than five years.
To aid respondents in identifying a past incident fitting
a fuzzy return request, we presented explanations of three
categories of customer return requests to the respondents.
They included the following: (1) returns that clearly fit
within the store’s return policy, (2) completely unacceptable
or fraudulent returns, and (3) somewhat outside the store’s
return policy (e.g., a week or two past the return deadline,
within the return period but without receipt). We then asked
respondents to assess the percentage of times they believed
that the return requests they received belonged to each of
these categories. More than one-third of our respondents
indicated that more than 20% of the returns they handle fit
into this third category (i.e., “somewhat outside the store’s
return policy”), exemplifying the relevance of this topic.
We then asked respondents to recall a recent, memo-
rable incident falling into this third category (i.e., a fuzzy
return request). To generate variance of the dependent
variable (compliance behavior), we randomly assigned half
the respondents to recall a fuzzy return incident in which
they accepted the return, while we asked the other half to
recall a fuzzy return in which they did not take back the
item. Researchers typically use this approach in critical
incident technique studies to obtain a broad range of situa-
tions (e.g., Bitner, Booms, and Mohr 1994; Holloway and
Beatty 2008). To aid in more vivid recall, respondents
described the reason for the return, price of the returned
item, and time the incident occurred. The top three cate-
gories of inappropriate customer return requests were “no
receipt” (22%), “beyond the return period” (20%), and “box/
packaging opened or missing” (10%). In terms of the item
value involved, 35% were valued at less than $25, 26%
were $25–$50, 20% were $51–$100, and the rest were
higher than $100. With regard to recency, 53% reported that
the incident had occurred in the past month, 25% of the
incidents occurred in the past one to three months, and the
rest more than three months previously. Respondents had
no difficulty recalling such a return request incident.
Measures
Appendix B presents the scales measuring the constructs
central to the study. We achieved content validity through
an extensive literature search and a thorough analysis of
interview scripts, which allowed us to define the domains of
constructs of interest and to generate the items. In addition, a
pretest with a convenience sample of retail employees (N =
430) provided a thorough assessment of the scales and
76 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012
methodology used in the main study.2 We used or adapted
established scales whenever possible with items and
sources identified in Appendix B.
All items contain multiple statements with one excep-
tion: A single item assesses compliance outcome, or the
degree to which the employee believed that he or she met
the customer’s expectations. In this case, a single item is
justified because the concept is concrete and represents the
idea well (Bergkvist and Rossiter 2007).
Recall that the sample involves two groups, those who
accepted the return and those who did not.3 Thus, we
checked the covariance and structural equivalence before
pooling the two subsamples for model testing. Following
Steenkamp and Baumgartner (1998), we first evaluated the
invariance of the factor loadings, factor variances, and
covariances across the two groups, finding evidence for the
equality of the covariances of the two subsamples.4 We then
evaluated the path coefficient equivalence by comparing the
free-estimated model against an equal path coefficient
model in which the subsamples are forced to have equal
path coefficients, as hypothesized in the model. Finding no
significant chi-square change (2(15) = 23.29, p = .08)
suggests that the measures of the focal constructs and their
relationships are not substantively different between the
subsamples, allowing us to pool groups.
2We conducted pretesting with an online survey using Qualtrics
with the goals of item reduction and scale purification. Students in
several upper-level undergraduate marketing classes at two south-
eastern universities earned extra credit by recruiting nonstudent
participants for our online survey. We subjected items to exploratory
and confirmatory factor analyses to initially reduce the item pool.
3As we expected, the “accept” group report higher mean com-
pliance outcome scores (i.e., the extent to which the employee met
the customer’s expectations on a five-point scale; see Appendix A)
than that reported by the “not accept” group (4.11 vs. 3.14, p <
.001). However, we found no other contextual and employee dif-
ferences on the basis of t-tests between the groups.
4We first estimated a baseline measurement model assuming the
same pattern of fixed and free parameters across the two subsam-
ples. This model fit the data well (2 = 1122.66, d.f. = 760; com-
parative fit index [CFI] = .97, nonnormed fit index [NNFI] = .96,
and root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = .048).
Next, we estimated a model that constrained the factor loadings to
be invariant across groups and found the fit indexes for this model
to be acceptable (2 = 1149.71, d.f. = 780; CFI = .97; NNFI = .96;
and RMSEA = .048), with the difference in fit between this model
and the baseline measurement model insignificant (2 = 27.05,
d.f. = 20, p = .13). Thus, the loadings for all measurement items
were invariant across samples. The third model estimated specified
invariant factor variance and covariances in addition to invariant
factor loadings. It has acceptable fit indexes (2 = 1188.91, d.f. =
845; CFI = .96; NNFI = .96; and RMSEA = .051), and the differ-
ence in fit between this model and the invariant factor model is not
significant (2 = 39.20, d.f. = 65, p = .99). Thus, all correlational
(covariance) relationships among model constructs, as well as
construct (factor) variances, are equal across samples. Finally, we
estimated a fully invariant measurement model (i.e., invariant fac-
tor loadings, invariant factor variance and covariances, and invari-
ant item error loadings). Although the indexes indicate adequate fit
(2 = 1447.68, d.f. = 875; CFI = .957; NNFI = .95; and RMSEA =
.057), this model’s fit differed from the fit of the covariances’
measurement model (2 = 258.77, d.f. = 30, p < .001). Still, the
invariance of the factor loadings, factor variances, and covariances
suggest that pooling the two subsamples is appropriate.
 As Bagozzi and Heatherton(1994) suggest, when deal-
ing with a large number of scales and items, large scales can
be disaggregated into subscales and the composites of the
subscales treated as indicators. Thus, we conceptualize
compliance process, composed of employee effort and
friendliness, as a higher-order factor. Treating the compli-
ance process as second-order constructs is justifiable con-
ceptually. First, compliance process is a superordinate con-
cept, meaning it is a general concept manifested by its
subdimensions. Moreover, aggregating its subdimensions in
our second-order model also matches its levels of abstrac-
tion with the other concepts in the model (Edwards 2001).5
Next, we subjected all measures, including the second-
order construct, to confirmatory factor analyses to assess their
psychometric properties; the results indicate a good model
fit (2 = 721.85, d.f. = 380, p < .01; CFI = .97; NNFI = .97;
and RMSEA = .047). Construct reliability and average vari-
ance extracted were strong for all latent variables (see
Appendix B). In addition, all constructs achieved discriminant
validity as assessed with the variance-extracted test (Fornell
and Larcker 1981). In this test, we compared the variance-
extracted estimates for the two constructs of interest with
the square of the correlation between the two constructs.
Two constructs have discriminant validity if their variance-
extracted estimates are greater than their squared correlations.
Common method bias. To assess the potential for common
method bias, we applied the marker variable (MV) method
and used a scale theoretically unrelated to at least one scale
in the analysis as the MV, which offers a proxy for common
method variance (Lindell and Whitney 2001). We used a
three-item scale that measured the similarity between the cus-
5Following Hair et al.’s (2009) criterion, we ran a separate con-
firmatory factor analysis second-order model; this model showed
superior predictive validity over the lower-order factor model.
Compared with the lower-order factor model, the second-order
model for compliance process (2 = 120.83, d.f. = 72, p < .05) fit
the data better; therefore, the subsequent structural model uses the
second-order measurement model for compliance process.
tomer and the employee (Crosby, Evans, and Cowles 1990)
(Cronbach’s  = .89) and selected the lowest positive corre-
lation (r = .01) between the MV and other variables to adjust
the construct correlations and statistical significance (Lindell
and Whitney 2001). None of the significant correlations
became insignificant after the adjustment (see Table 1), indi-
cating that common method bias is not a serious concern here.
Covariates. To account for the potential impact of
variables not identified in our model on our hypothesized
relationships, we first regressed all dependent variables
(including compliance process, compliance outcome, and
three aspects of legitimacy) in our model on the covariates
mentioned previously, obtained the residuals (i.e., the items
with covariate effects parceled out), and used these residu-
als to test our model. Other researchers have adopted this
method in the past (e.g., Ahearne, Bhattachary, and Gruen
2005). The results and conclusions remain largely
unchanged, regardless of whether we control for covariates.
The results in Table 2 and subsequent analyses use the
residuals of focal constructs in the analysis.
Test of Hypotheses: Main Effects
Table 1 provides pairwise correlations and descriptive sta-
tistics of our main constructs. We derived the full structural
model from our hypotheses using the conceptual model pre-
sented in Figure 1. Table 2 presents the standardized path
coefficients for all relationships in the structural model. As
Table 2 shows, our data support the proposed model (2 =
899.35, d.f. = 407, p < .01; CFI = .96; NNFI = .96; and
RMSEA = .054). The hypothesized model explains 43.6% of
the variance in the current compliance process and 44.9%
of the compliance outcome variance. Although the negative
impact of expectations of punishment on compliance out-
come did not materialize (H6b), the analyses support the
other main effect hypotheses.
In addition, to test the hypothesized nonsignificant
effects of the customer’s affiliative interaction style on
employees’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the request, we
ran a new structural equation model adding paths from affil-

TABlE 1
Correlations and Descriptive Statistics
Variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
1. Compliance process .76 .12** .04 .02 –.05 –.01 –.02 .09 .04 .44 .32**
2. Compliance outcome .13** — .36** –.40** .33** .46** .40** .24** –.18** .06 –.02
3. Affiliation .05 .37** .96 –.65** .16** .33** .45** .06 –.09 .00 –.07
4. Dominance .03 –.39** –.63** .89 –.23** –.42** –.48** –.05 .05 .07 .07
5. Regulative legitimacy –.04 .34** .17** –.22** .93 .32 .17** .00 .08 –.18** –.10
6. Normative legitimacy .01 .47** .34** –.41** .33** .89 .61** .00 .00 –.05 –.11*
7. Cognitive legitimacy –.01 .41** .46** –.47** .18** .61** .88 –.04 .02 .00 –.06
8. Norm of flexibility .10 .25** .07 –.04 .01 .01 –.03 .88 –.40** .16** .17**
9. Expectations of punishment .05 –.17** –.08 .06 .09 .01 .03 –.39** .96 –.03 .08
10. Customer orientation .45** .07 .01 .08 –.17** –.04 .01 .17** –.02 .90 .42**
11. Conflict avoidance .33** –.01 –.06 .08 –.09 –.10* –.05 .18** .09 .43** .87
12. MV (fairness) –.11* –.10* –.03 –.01 .05 .09 .01 –.34** .23** –.23** –.18**
M 5.71 3.62 4.47 4.26 2.49 2.68 2.98 4.97 3.94 6.34 5.65
SD .84 1.41 1.72 1.62 1.52 1.24 1.19 1.35 1.78 .81 1.07
*p < .05.
**p < .01.
Notes: Zero-order correlations are below the diagonal; adjusted correlations for potential common method variances (Lindell and Whitney
2001) are above the diagonal. Bold numbers in the diagonal are average variance extracted for constructs.

Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests / 77

 TABlE 2
Results of Hypothesized Relationships
Main Model Organizational Tenure Moderations

78 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012

Gender Moderations
Standardized Shorter longer
Estimate Male Female (N = 177; (N = 234;
Hypothesized Relationships (t-Value) (N = 127) (N = 284) 2(1) ≤3 Years) >3 Years) 2(1)
H1a: CO Æ compliance process .52 (7.71)** H8a .46 .63 10.33**
H1b: CA Æ compliance process .19 (2.85)** H7a –.11 n.s. .39 7.42** H8b .13 .20 n.s.
H2: Affiliation Æ compliance process .16 (3.09)** H7b .18 .17 n.s.
H3: Affiliation Æ compliance outcome .12 (2.44)* H7c .21 –.09 n.s. 4.28*
H4a: Dominance Æ regulative legitimacy –.27 (–5.04)** H7d –.20 –.30 n.s. H8c –.11 –.41 6.98**
H4b: Dominance Æ normative legitimacy –.52 (–10.43)** H7e –.67 –.46 n.s. H8d –.48 –.56 n.s.
H4c: Dominance Æ cognitive legitimacy –.60 (–11.74)** H7f –.81 –.52 4.80* H8e –.65 –.56 n.s.
H5a: Regulative legitimacy Æ compliance outcome .24 (5.40)**
H5b: Normative legitimacy Æ compliance outcome .28 (5.94)**
H5c: Cognitive legitimacy Æ compliance outcome .17 (3.26)**
H6a: Flexibility Æ compliance outcome .21 (4.06)**
H6b: Expectation of punish Æ compliance outcome –.06 (–1.22)
Controlled Path:
Compliance outcome Æ compliance process .23 (4.26)**
2
Main model fit:  (407) = 899.35, p < .01; CFI = .96; NNFI = .96; and RMSEA = .054. Squared multiple correlation for compliance outcome: 44.9%; squared multiple correlation
for compliance process: 43.6%.
*p < .05.
**p < .01.
Notes: n.s. = not significant. Supported moderation hypotheses are in boldface.
iation to the three aspects of legitimacy to the primary
model. We found that all three paths were insignificant
(standard path coefficients were .03, –.08, and .11, respec-
tively; p > .10) and that this model does not fit better than
the primary model (2(3) = 1.74, p = .63), in support of
our “no effect” hypotheses (H4d–f.)
Follow-Up Analyses
Furthermore, we performed formal tests of mediation to
examine the full mediation roles of three aspects of legiti-
macy in the negative impacts of dominance on compliance
outcome. All correlation coefficients between dominance
and the legitimacy elements are positive and significant
(.34, .47, and .41, respectively; p < .01). Following the pro-
cedures for testing full mediation using structural equation
modeling, as Iacobucci, Saldanha, and Deng (2007) suggest,
we first fit the direct and indirect paths simultaneously to
estimate both the direct and indirect impacts of dominance
on compliance outcome. We then computed the z-scores for
the indirect impacts and checked the significance of our
direct path coefficients. The direct path coefficient from
dominance to compliance outcome was not significant, and
the z scores were significant for all hypothesized full medi-
ations: dominance Æ regulative legitimacy Æ compliance
outcome, dominance Æ normative legitimacy Æ compliance
outcome, and dominance Æ cognitive legitimacy Æ com-
pliance outcome. Thus, the analyses support the hypothe-
sized full mediation role of legitimacy in the links from
dominance to compliance outcome, in accordance with
motivated reasoning theory. Finally, Sobel tests confirm
mediation by showing the significant indirect impact of
dominance on compliance outcome through regulative
legitimacy, normative legitimacy, and cognitive legitimacy
(z-scores were 3.68, 5.16, and 3.14, respectively).
Tests of Moderation Effects
Invariance assessment. Before conducting multigroup
analyses, we first tested whether the measures were invari-
ant across male (N = 127) and female (N = 284) employees
by estimating a hierarchy of multigroup measurement
invariance models (Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1998). We
carried out a similar procedure for the shorter-tenured
groups (N = 177 with no more than three years of organiza-
tional tenure) versus longer-tenured groups (N = 234 with
more than three years of organizational tenure). Our analy-
ses support invariance across the groups, allowing for the
subsequent moderation assessments.6
6The first model estimated was a baseline measurement model
of the same pattern of fixed and free parameters. This model fit the
data well (2 = 1163.35, d.f. = 760; CFI = .97; NNFI = .96; and
RMSEA = .051). Next, we estimated a model that constrained the
factor loadings to be invariant across groups and found the fit
indexes for this model to be acceptable (2 = 1182.75, d.f. = 780;
CFI = .97; NNFI = .96; and RMSEA =.050) and the difference in
fit between this model and the baseline measurement model to be
insignificant (2 = 19.4, d.f. = 20, p = .50). Thus, the loadings for
all measurement items are invariant across samples. The third
model estimated specified invariant factor variance and covari-
ances in addition to invariant factor loadings. It has acceptable fit
indexes (2 = 1230.39, d.f. = 845; CFI = .96; NNFI = .96; and
Gender assessments. To test the gender differences pro-
posed, we tested a baseline model in which we freely esti-
mated all hypothesized parameters for both men and
women. Table 2 shows separate path estimates for hypothe-
sized relationships resulting from this analysis in separate
columns. We then conducted nested structural equation
models in which we constrained the paths corresponding to
our proposed links to be equal across men and women.
Table 2 presents the resulting chi-square differences with 1
degree of freedom between each constrained model and its
associated freely estimated model. We applied similar
multigroup analysis procedures to the tenure variable, in
which we divided tenure groups as previously noted.
Consistent with expectations, CA is more strongly asso-
ciated with the compliance process for female than for male
employees (women = .39 vs. men = –.11; 2 = 7.42, p <
.001), while the effect of customer affiliation on the compli-
ance outcome is stronger for men (men = .21 vs. women =
–.09; 2 = 4.28, p < .05), in support of H7a and H7c. In
addition, the customer’s dominant style is more strongly
associated with male employees’ judgments of the request’s
cognitive legitimacy than with female employees’ judg-
ments (men = –.81 vs. women = –52; 2 = 4.80, p < .01),
in support of H7f, but the analysis did not reveal differences
regarding regulative and normative legitimacy (providing
no support for H7d and H7e).
Tenure assessments. Finally, a stronger association
between employees’ CO and their compliance process
exists (longer = .63 vs. shorter = .46; 2 = 10.33, p < .001)
and between customer dominance and regulative legitimacy
(longer = –.41 vs. shorter = –.11; 2 = 6.98, p < .01) for
longer-tenure employees versus those with less tenure, in
support of both H8a and H8c. However, the proposed tenure
differences between the employees’ CA and their compli-
ance process and the effect of customer dominance on cog-
nitive and normative legitimacy did not materialize, provid-
ing no support for H8b, H8d, and H8e.
Discussion
Summary of Findings and Academic Contribution
The current study is a first attempt at addressing the
employee decision-making process when facing customers’
fuzzy return requests. From a theory-building perspective,
this study contributes to the literature by fully modeling
important antecedents to employees’ compliance process
RMSEA = .047), and the difference in fit between this model and
the invariant factor model is not significant (2 = 47.64, d.f. =
65, p = .95). Thus, all correlational (covariance) relationships
among model constructs, as well as construct (factor) variances,
are equal across samples. Finally, we estimated a fully invariant
measurement model (i.e., invariant factor loadings, invariant fac-
tor variance and covariances, and invariant item error loadings).
Although the indexes indicate adequate fit (2 = 1313.39, d.f. =
875; CFI = .967, NNFI = .96, and RMSEA = .049), this model’s fit
differs from the fit of the baseline measurement model (2 =
83.0, d.f. = 30, p < .01). Still, the invariance of the factor loadings,
factor variances, and covariances suggest that comparing model
paths across samples is appropriate.
Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests / 79
behaviors and outcome decisions, including customer,
request, employee, and organizational factors. Specifically,
the analyses support the positive influence of employee CO
and CA on employee’s compliance process behaviors,
including friendliness and effort, suggesting the important
role of these individual difference variables. In addition, the
positive influence of customers’ affiliative style on employee
reactions (relative to both process and outcome) to fuzzy
return requests indicates that indeed liking begets liking,
with positive emotions being contagious or echoed back.
However, when customers exhibit a dominant style, it
appears to trigger the employee to engage in a motivated
reasoning process, with the employee adopting a defensive
stance and judging the customer’s request to be less legiti-
mate, thereby reducing his or her likelihood to comply with
the request. This strong and consistent finding, across all
three types of legitimacy, extends the field’s understanding of
employee decision making in customer–employee encoun-
ters beyond what emotional contagion theory suggests—
namely, that the echoing mechanism primarily operates
(i.e., customers’ interaction styles directly affect employ-
ees’ reactions to the customers).
We also find strong support for the three aspects of per-
ceived legitimacy in predicting employees’ compliance out-
come choices, which fits with script theory. In addition to
assessing the degree to which a fuzzy request violates com-
pany rules (regulatory legitimacy), employees also use social
norms (i.e., normative legitimacy) and cognitive sense-making
(cognitive legitimacy) to judge these requests. Our study
provides a more complete picture of this relationship than
those offered in previous studies of legitimacy and returns.
In this study, employees’ feelings of empowerment
(assessed by perceived flexibility) influenced compliance
outcomes as expected, while employees’ expectations of
punishment did not affect outcome decisions. This lack of
effect may have occurred because employees believed that
punishment was not relevant in these types of return situa-
tions; that is, perhaps they believed they could safely bend
the rules with these generally inexpensive return requests or
even that it was worth the risk to treat the customer fairly
(e.g., Kennedy and Corliss 2008).
Not only do we offer conceptual and empirical support
for the separation of compliance outcome and process
behaviors in this study, we also predict and find a different
set of antecedents for each. We find that the compliance
process, which is more discretionary, is mainly influenced
by interpersonal factors (i.e., the customer and the
employee factors), while the outcome, a more scripted
activity, is influenced by factors pertinent to multiple role
senders, including a customer factor (affiliation), a request
factor (legitimacy), and an organizational factor (norm of
flexibility). Therefore, this nuanced view of employee
behaviors enhances the managerial relevance of this study.
Moreover, this work contributes to the service marketing
literature by showing that the antecedents of employees’ com-
pliance outcome and employee process weigh differently for
male versus female employees, as well as for employees
with shorter versus longer organizational tenure. In particular,
male employees in our study were more negatively affected
by their customers’ dominant style than female employees,
80 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012
suggesting that men may rely more heavily on motivated
reasoning in assessing the request’s cognitive legitimacy,
while their reported compliance outcome choices were more
positively affected by the customers’ affiliation style (due to
emotional contagion). Thus, notably, customers’ interaction
styles generally influenced men more than women in their
decision making. In contrast, CA had a lower effect on men
than women with regard to providing a friendlier, more
effortful treatment of customers. Such rich contingency
views of employee gender differences in the presence of
fuzzy requests offer valuable management implications.
In addition, the findings indicate that longer-tenured
employees, who need fewer mental resources to engage in
typical task behaviors (given their past practice), have more
resources left over to act on their own volition than those
with a shorter organizational tenure. For example, employ-
ees with longer tenure (vs. shorter tenure) relied more on
their own CO in handling the request (i.e., the process).
Furthermore, a customer’s dominant style had a stronger
effect on their assessment of the regulative legitimacy of the
claims. This first finding is similar to Wang et al.’s (2011)
finding that longer-tenured employees allocate more
resources to regulate their service-related emotions and
behaviors in the face of negative customer behaviors.
Notably, the stronger influence of the dominant customer
style in our study extends the field’s understanding of
employees’ reactions to negative customer behaviors by
showing how longer-tenured employees surreptitiously
achieve their goal of punishing the offending customer (by
reinterpreting their view of the situation).7
Managerial Implications
The frequency of fuzzy returns and the percentage of accep-
tance of such returns reported by our national sample of
retail employees indicate the significance of this neglected
phenomenon. While 36% of the respondents indicated that
at least 20% of their returns belong in this fuzzy request
category, they chose to accept these types of returns on
average 48% of the time. Moreover, the importance of this
issue is reflected by the degree to which firms embrace giv-
ing employees empowerment and flexibility in their jobs
(e.g., Ritz-Carlton allows its employees to spend up to
$2,000 to solve a customer’s problem (Michel, Bowen, and
Johnston 2008). It is evident that employees deal with these
types of requests and decisions relative to them on an
almost daily basis. Employee decisions about whether to
break the rules and how to handle these issues diplomati-
cally can have a large impact on customer satisfaction, loy-
alty, and, ultimately, the bottom line. Thus, our findings
indicate several important managerial implications.
7To exclude the possible confounding effects of longer-term
employees tending to hold supervisory positions, we compared all
the five differentiated impacts across employees with supervisor
title (N = 133) with those without supervisor title (N = 101) for
those with more than three years of tenure. We conducted a nested
structural equation model comparison to test whether the relation-
ship strengths of the five moderations differ across the supervisor
and nonsupervisor subgroups. The results indicate that the find-
ings noted here were not driven by whether the longer-term
employee was a supervisor.
 First, service firms should recognize that several factors
influence employees’ on-the-spot compliance behaviors
other than the objective aspects of the requests. Thus, ser-
vice firms should ensure that the job designs and job
descriptions of frontline employees accurately reflect what
management wants to accomplish relative to fuzzy requests.
If employees do not clearly know when and how to imple-
ment (or bend) the firm’s policies and procedures, manage-
ment should train employees in this area. Furthermore, firms
must understand the types of fuzzy requests employees are
likely to encounter to identify acceptable deviations from
the rules, as well as to provide ways to help employees
reject the customer’s claim diplomatically when necessary.
Second, our findings suggest that beyond whether the
return violates the rules (regulatory legitimacy), the firm
should tap into frontline employees’ understanding of nor-
mative and cognitive legitimacy with regard to these deci-
sions. Knowing that employees also attempt to make sense
of the request from social norm (whether it is socially
acceptable) and personal norm (whether it is comprehensi-
ble) perspectives suggests that service firms should commu-
nicate the rationales of the (return) policies from both social
logic and sense-making perspectives, as well as provide the
regulations and rules to follow.
The strong effect of the customer’s dominant style on all
three forms of legitimacy suggests that employees need addi-
tional training aimed at not letting their subjective and negative
feelings toward a customer’s approach affect their objective
assessment of the return’s legitimacy. The strong association
of CO and CA with employees’ compliance process behav-
iors provides insights for training and hiring. That is, even if
the employee cannot comply, he or she can make the process
less painful for the customer. Moreover, this positive treatment
seems enhanced for longer-term employees because they rely
more on CO and for women because they desire to avoid
conflicts. These findings suggest the importance of hiring
people with high CO (or training for that characteristic) to
reduce the sting of refusing a customer’s return request.
With regard to hiring people with greater CA, this
should be done cautiously, considering that the positive role
of CA in the compliance process was only relevant for
female (not male) employees. Moreover, female employees
reported delivering compliance more positively than male
employees (5.78 vs. 5.55, p < .01). These findings suggest
that service firms should select employees with desirable
personality traits (e.g., high CO) and get female employees
more involved with sensitive return situations.
Finally, service firms should acknowledge the differential
routes of formal and informal control systems in encouraging
desirable employee behavior. Expectations of punishment
(relative to taking a return back that is outside company policy)
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 APPENDIX A
Qualitative Research Findings
Categories Constructs Example Quotes (Name, Retailer Type, Organizational Tenure)
Customer factors Interaction styles: affiliation
•Depending on the person, if they’re being really polite and stuff like that, then we’ll do something about it. [Erick,
specialty store, 4 years]
•For a legitimate return,… they feel they’re doing something wrong or they are not sure what they are going to do;…
sometimes they hide it or their little kids hold it or something like that;… very embarrassed … very apologetic. [Kelly,
specialty store, 4 years]
Interaction styles: dominance •Normally they (the customers) came in with the attitude of, “You have to take this return.” And I was like, “No, I don’t
have to do it.” [Amber, specialty store, 5 years]
•When a customer starts acting rude, I guess that is when our own egos come into play;… the ego gets involved,
and you kind of abide by the company policy. [Erick, specialty store, 4 years]
Request factors Regulative legitimacy •I know we are supposed to please the customer, but we should follow the policy before we let them have whatever
they want. [Cassandra, department store, 1 year]
•They (return requests) weren’t within our guidelines for the return policy; they have no proof of purchase; or for
some reason, we couldn’t verify that that item was purchased in our store;… we have to pretty much stick to the
rules and regulations. [Kathy, department store, 3 years]
Normative legitimacy •It depends whether they’re trying to take advantage or not. If they’re truly trying to return a product because it did
not work out…sometimes that happens…I would feel bad to reject them. [Chris, specialty store, 2 years]
Cognitive legitimacy •I was very open to making exceptions if there was a valid reason or if I feel like we gained a customer more than
we lost. [Renee, department store, 3.5 years]
Organizational factors Perceived norm of flexibility
•We’re allowed to break any rule in the book to keep a customer satisfied…. I had authority to do whatever I needed
to do to make the customer happy. [Kelly, specialty store, 4 years]
•On our rule book, it said no returns, final. You say “No.” [Darlene, outlet, 3 years]
Expectations of punishment •Bending the rules isn’t something that’s really going to benefit me at all. The customer may be happy in the end, but
if someone above me catches that, that would be my job there. For me, just sticking to the rules and regulations of
it, it’s probably the smartest way to go. [Greg, chain store, 4 years]
•You might want to bend the rules for some people, but if you do, it’s your job on the line. [Richard, department store,
1 year]
Employee factors CA •I really only chose to let it go because … I just didn’t want to deal with hassle of this guy. “No I can’t.” Then having him
be all like, “Oh come on,” or “Let me talk to your manager,” something that would escalate. And often at work I would
try to do the least work as possible. That’s why I just gave the guy store credit. [David, department store, 4 years]
CO •Customer satisfaction is the most important thing. For them (customers) to have that peace of mind of being able to
return what they want. I guess it would be convenient for customers. It (rejecting customers) makes me feel bad
because I wouldn’t be able to satisfy them as an employee. [David, specialty store, 1.5 years]
•I don’t mind refunding a customer’s money. The customer needs to be happy. That’s my philosophy, that’s the bot-
tom line, that’s the most important thing to me. [Sarah, specialty store, 1 year]
Compliance Process Friendliness •I was by myself and I started really calm (recalling an incident when she dealt with an angry customer), I was
explaining everything to her. Finally she left and her daughter came back and apologized. The daughter said,
“Thank you, you were being super nice. It’s just that my mom has been having a bad day.” [Darlene, outlet, 3 years]
Effort •They [a pair of shoes] had dirt on the bottom, so technically, according to policy, we couldn’t return them. But, I just
said, “You know what? I’ll clean them in the back.” I went to back and I wiped to dirt off from underneath. So, my
manager didn’t know and it was fine. We returned it. [Chris, specialty store, 2 years]
Compliance outcome •If you had a receipt, you were able to get it put back on your credit card, or get cash. If you brought it back without

Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests / 85

a receipt, it was store credit. [Greg, specialty store, 4 years]
 APPENDIX B
Focal Construct Measures
Construct and Source Items (Description) Factor loading
Affiliation 1. When making the return request, the customer seemed tactful. .90
(Norton 1978) 2. When making the return request, the customer seemed friendly. .99
CR = .96 3. When making the return request, the customer seemed nice. .95
Dominance 1. When making the return request, the customer seemed aggressive. .90
(Snavely and Walters 2. When making the return request, the customer seemed too assertive. .82
1983) 3. When making the return request, the customer seemed to want to control .72
CR = .87 the situation.
CO 1. I enjoy delivering quality service to our customers. .84
(Brown et al. 2002) 2. I get a great deal of satisfaction in completing tasks asked of me by our .76
CR = .86 customers.
3. I enjoy having the confidence to provide good service to customers. .87
CA 1. I try to avoid unpleasant exchange with others. .66
(Rahim 1983) 2. I generally avoid an argument with others. .82
CR = .83 3. I try to stay away from disagreements with others. .87
Regulative legitimacy 1. The customer’s return request … slightly violated ... seriously violated our .88
(self-developed: first item store policies (R)
is semantic differential) 2. It did not fit with our return policies. (R) .89
CR = .92 3. It went well beyond our return policies. (R) .90
Normative legitimacy Given the customer’s return request in this situation, most people I know would
(self-developed: semantic think that accepting the return would be:
differential) 1. Completely unacceptable … completely acceptable .91
CR = .88 2. Unreasonable….reasonable .99
3. Justified … unjustified .60
Cognitive legitimacy 1. For this return request, the customer’s explanation made no sense to me… .87
(self-developed: semantic made perfect sense.
differential) 2. For this return request, the customer’s explanation was not .81
CR = .86 comprehensible….was totally comprehensible
3. For this return request, the customer’s explanation was clearly .78
inappropriate…was clearly appropriate
Perceived norm of flexibility 1. In our store employees are expected to strictly follow the store’s return .80
(Heide and John 1992) policies.(R)
CR = .86 2. Flexibility in response to customers’ return request is normal here. .80
3. In our store, it is important to satisfy the customer even if it means bending .87
the rules.
Expectations of punishment 1. If I accept a return outside company policy, I might get into trouble. .90
(self-developed) 2. If I accept a return outside company policy, my supervisor might not approve. .95
CR = .95 3. If I accept a return outside company policy, I might get reprimanded. .94
Compliance process: 1. During the interaction, I was friendly to the customer. .78
employee friendliness 2. During the interaction, I was polite to the customer. .91
(Liao 2007) 3. During the interaction, I was patient with the customer. .76
CR = .86
Compliance process: Please recall how you actually handled the return by responding to the
employee effort following statements.
(Liao 2007) 1. I tried very hard to meet the customer’s return expectations. .81
CR = .87 2. I put a lot of effort into this return situation in order to meet the customer’s .92
expectations.
3. I went the extra mile to help this customer. .74
Compliance outcome To what extent do you feel that you met the customer’s return expectations?
(Payan and McFarland Did not meet expectations at all … fully met expectations
2005)
Notes: All scales are seven-point Likert scales unless otherwise noted (1 = “strongly disagree,” and 7 = “strongly agree”). (R) = reverse scored.

86 / Journal of Marketing, November 2012