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This study aims to investigate whether frontline retail banking employees’ proactive personality helps in ameliorating customer engagement. This study further aims to investigate the mediational role of work engagement and service recovery performance in the employee proactivity – customer engagement relationship.

This study used a triadic approach for the collection of primary data. Each triad consisted of a customer, a frontline employee and an immediate colleague of the frontline employee. Structured questionnaires were used to solicit data from the respondents. Specifically, customers were asked to report their level of engagement with the bank and the recovery performance of the employee who redressed their grievances. Frontline employees responded to their level of work engagement while their colleagues reported about the proactive disposition of frontline employees at the workplace.

Empirical findings revealed under service scenario, Indian retail banking employees’ proactive disposition nurtures customer engagement. It was further observed that this relationship is sequentially mediated by work engagement and service recovery performance.

The role of frontline employees in enriching customer engagement has to date remained under-researched among marketing scholars. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the maiden attempt to relate frontline employee proactivity with customer engagement. Also, this study is one of the early research to investigate customer engagement under a service recovery context, thereby, opening pathways for further exploration.

This study explores the driver influence of employee proactive personality on service recovery performance with work engagement as mediator. The moderating role of job resources (social support, supervisory coaching and performance feedback) is also examined in the proactivity-performance linkage to analyze the interaction effect of employee proactivity and job resources on recovery performance.

Primary data pertaining to the constructs under investigation were collected using a structured questionnaire from 432 dyads of employees from four companies operating in the Indian retail banking sector. Each dyad comprised of one frontline employee and her peer (colleague). Responses to work engagement and job resources were self-reported by frontline staff, as peer ratings were solicited for frontline employees' proactivity and recovery performance.

Empirical findings suggest that frontline employees' proactive personality significantly ameliorates their work engagement which in turn exerts a positive driver effect on their service recovery performance. In the case of less proactive employees (those with a proactivity score of less than mean value), service recovery performance is boosted when they receive constant feedback on their recovery performance. The results, however, did not provide significant evidence with regard to the moderating role of social support and supervisory coaching.

This study is one of the maiden attempts to relate employee proactive personality with service recovery performance. Since the research relating personality with recovery performance is largely underexplored yet fundamentally important, this study expands the available literature by examining as to what type of employee is more likely to deliver superior service recovery performance with little organizational support.

Kaplan and Norton (1996b) claimed that there exists a sequential dependency between the four balanced scorecard perspectives (learning and growth, internal business processes, customer, and financial). Although theoretically supported by various researchers, the said claim has, somehow, attracted limited empirical attention. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether empirical evidence will support the theoretically grounded interrelations between the four balanced scorecard perspectives.

For this study, a total of 13 key performance indicators were identified and then clustered into the four perspectives of balanced scorecard, followed by the development of causal linkages. Data related to these indicators were collected from 1,001 employees and 985 customers of two Indian retail banks and then tested for hypothesized relationships using structural equation modeling. All the constructs were measured using scales developed in previous research works.

The results indicate that employee learning and growth positively influence the internal business processes which in turn influence the customer perspective. Finally, the customer perspective has a significant positive influence on the financial performance. Further, it was also revealed that internal business processes mediate the relationship between employee learning and growth and customer perspective. Also, the relationship between internal business processes and financial performance is significantly mediated by customer perspective.

Majority of the previous research on causal linkages of balanced scorecard has been theoretical in nature. Whatever little empirical research is available in this regard is limited to developed nations. In a developing nation like India, these linkages have seldom been examined in the past. The study has been conducted to plug this gap in the literature and, resultantly, provide further insights into the interrelations of the balanced scorecard perspectives.