Accountability and discretion in complex, non-routine financial services

Integrating accountability and job autonomy theories, we propose that task complexity and task non-routineness trigger employees' adaptive behavior and unethical behavior concurrently during customer service co-production. Customer control moderates these relationships by shifting accountability to customers and reducing employee job autonomy. To provide a person-situation interactional view, we also examine the three-way effects of employees' self-monitoring trait. Using the experience sampling methodology, we collected 798 service episodes from 62 financial service employees working in the banks of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Our survey results indicated that task complexity and task non-routineness relate to both adaptive behavior and unethical behaviors concurrently. Moreover, task complexity interacts with customer control and self-monitoring to jointly affect adaptive behavior, whereas task non-routineness interacts with customer control and self-monitoring to jointly affect unethical behavior. In complex...