Can Friends Also Become Customers? The Impact of Employee Referral Programs on Referral Likelihood
Can Friends Also Become Customers? The Impact of Employee Referral Programs on Referral Likelihood
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DOI：
10.1177/1094670513518271
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发表时间：
2014-01
影响因子：
12.4
通讯作者：
D. Wentzel;T. Tomczak;S. Henkel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
D. Wentzel;T. Tomczak;S. Henkel
客户推荐计划，鼓励现有客户在他们的社交网络中推荐公司的服务，已经成为一种流行的营销工具。这项研究的重点是另一个社会群体，也可能发出建议，即公司自己的员工。根据社会认同研究，作者发现，当员工的身份非常突出时，员工更有可能推销公司的服务。此外，这种影响受到关系规范的调节，例如员工只愿意在他们认为这是友谊中的适当行为时推荐他们的朋友。具体来说，结果显示，身份显着性只影响转介的可能性时，转介的框架，而不是市场定价的公共共享（研究1），当转介奖励分配给朋友，而不是员工（研究2）。最后，研究3表明，关系框架是唯一有效的，在增加转介时，员工觉得有很小的风险，他们的公司的服务将不会按照预期进行。因此，有兴趣增加员工朋友推荐的经理可能不仅需要将推荐与员工的组织身份联系起来，而且还需要说服员工，推荐并不违反关系规范。
Customer referral programs, which encourage existing customers to recommend a firm’s services in their social network, have become a popular marketing tool. This research focuses on another social group that may also issue recommendations, namely a firm’s own employees. Drawing on social identity research, the authors find that employees are more likely to promote their firm’s services when their employee identity is highly salient. Moreover, this effect is moderated by relational norms, such that employees are only willing to refer their friends when they feel that this is an appropriate behavior in a friendship. Specifically, the results reveal that identity salience only affects referral likelihood when referrals are framed in terms of communal sharing rather than market pricing (Study 1) and when referral rewards are assigned to the friends rather than to the employees (Study 2). Finally, Study 3 shows that relational framing is only effective in increasing referrals when employees feel that there is little risk that their firm’s services will not perform as expected. Thus, managers interested in increasing employee referrals of friends may not only need to link referrals to employees’ organizational identity but may also need to convince employees that referrals do not violate relational norms.