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This paper aims to examine the effect of employees’ emotional labor on work engagement and boundary-spanner creativity based on the job demands-resources model from the perspective of salespeople.

To analyze the data, a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling procedure using LISREL 8.5 were used. Next, the conditional process modeling was fitted to test the moderated mediation hypotheses.

The analysis results showed that deep acting has a positive effect on work engagement, whereas surface acting has a negative effect, indicating that work engagement of sales representatives is differently related to each factor of emotional labor. Second, work engagement of salespeople has a positive effect on boundary spanner creativity. Next, entrepreneurship has a moderate effect in the relationship between emotional labor and work engagement with customer stewardship and has a positive moderating effect in the relationship between work engagement and boundary spanner creativity.

Considering the positive effect of boundary spanner creativity on work engagement, it is important to maintain interaction with customers, including adaptive behaviors and customer orientation, as customers’ demand increases. The individual competence and capability of salespeople such as entrepreneurship are directly related to interaction with customers, so when the right strategy is defined for each type of entrepreneurship of salespeople, it will create a positive corporate culture and lead to performance improvement.

Compared with most studies, more direct factors of emotional labor were assessed to detect positive effects in this study. More specifically, when salespeople were forced to fake their feelings, they were more likely to recognize stress or burnout due to emotional dissonance between what they really felt and what they had to express to comply with organizational regulations.

External inputs are critical for organisational creativity. In order to bridge different thought worlds and cross-organisational barriers, managers must initiate and motivate boundary spanning processes. The purpose of this paper is to explore how boundary spanners manage creativity projects across organisational boundaries.

The authors link to previous literature and present findings from a comparative case study of managerial practices for managing creativity projects. Data were collected through interviews, secondary materials, site visits and observation.

Three meta-practices used by managers to manage boundary-spanning creative projects are presented: defining the creative space, making space for creativity and acting in the creative space. These practices are detailed in seven case studies of creative projects.

The analysis focuses on boundary spanning as a management process rather than a capability for organisations to self-organise. It extends the “boundary spanning as practice” literature by focusing on boundary spanning as a managerial practice and brings the problems related to resource mobilisation across both organisational and departmental boundaries to the fore.

Understanding the managerial dilemma faced by creativity managers is a first step to finding solutions. The discussed practices may inspire managers both in resolving creativity management problems and through self-reflection.

The authors contribute to research on boundary spanning practices by linking to creativity research, and bridge to research on management and governance in distributed and less-defined organisations.

This paper examined the mediating role of boundary spanning behavior and the moderating effects of traditionality linking humble leadership and employee creative performance from the perspective of Social Exchange Theory (SET) to reveal the behavioral mechanism and boundary condition regarding the influence of humble leadership on creative performance.

A sample of 276 employees and the supervisors from 8 companies in China was taken using two-wave data.

The results indicated that humble leadership was positively related to employee creative performance, and boundary spanning behavior partially mediated the relationship between humble leadership and employee creative performance. Traditionality strengthens the mediation process when traditionality is high.

These findings provide several theoretical and practical implications for the domains of humble leadership and boundary spanning behavior. For example, human resource (HR) departments can recruit leaders with high humility and cultivate team leaders through systematic training programs about self-awareness, openness and self-transcendence; team leaders should encourage employees to participate in boundary spanning activities and hiring managers select employees with high traditionality to synergize with leader humility.

Based on the SET, this paper explored the behavioral mechanism between humble leadership and creative performance and enriched the prior research, which is from the cognitive or emotional view, and further answered the question “what are the employees' behavioral responses when they confront the humble leadership”.

Although research analyzing the consequences of salesperson social media use in driving sales behaviors and performance outcomes has proliferated in the recent past, there are significant research gaps in the domain. Grounded in task-technology fit theory, this paper aims to propose a conceptual framework that integrates between previously disjointed areas of research and analyzes the relationships between salesperson social media use, brand awareness, creativity, manager empowerment and company performance.

Survey responses were collected from a multi-industry sample of 158 business-to-business salespeople. Structural relationships were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The analysis shows that salesperson social media use positively affects brand awareness. The relationship between social media and brand awareness is magnified with the increase in salesperson creativity. Findings also show that manager empowerment increases salesperson creativity. Finally, brand awareness positively affects company performance.

Sales organizations should focus on developing digital strategies, especially focusing on salesperson social media use to enhance company’s brand awareness, which in turn increases company performance. Moreover, sales managers should also follow empowering leader behaviors to enhance creativity.

The authors amalgamate salesperson social media use literature and branding literature by proposing salesperson social media use’s positive effects on brand awareness. This study also expands the knowledge by exploring the moderating effect of individual-level variables such as salesperson creativity on driving the effects of salesperson social media use.

The paper aims to explore the role of climate for creativity and innovation as the situational variable to lead to both expected and unexpected consequences (e.g. performance and unethical behavior), by discovering the relationships among task characteristics (e.g. difficulty, clarity and performance pressure), individual psychological aspects (e.g. mindfulness and self-justification) and work environmental conditions (e.g. peer behavior and climate for creativity and innovation). In this study, task characteristics are proposed to positively associate with unethical behavior via mindfulness. Moreover, climate for creativity and innovation is proposed to moderate the relationship between self-justification and unethical behavior. Finally, unethical behavior is predicted to positively influence on performance.

Data were collected from the sample of salespeople, who are working for variety of companies in Vietnam. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and SmartPLS 3 are implemented to test the path model.

Emphasizing both bright and dark sides of promoting creativity and innovation, the study highlights the role of climate for creativity and innovation in strengthening the positive relationship between self-justification and unethical behavior. In turn, unethical behavior positively influences performance. Further, the findings indicate that mindfulness contributes in explaining unconscious unethical behavior.

Exploring the relationships among climate for creativity and innovation, unethical behavior and performance, this paper contributes for deeper understanding of variety aspects of innovation. Demands for an intelligent management in modern workplaces are suggested.

Salespeople frequently face the predicament of wanting to protect their market knowledge from coworkers while not appearing recalcitrant. Considering the choice of disclosing information or refusing to disclose, they may choose a third option: appearing to share knowledge while concealing substantive information, which this study calls evasive knowledge hiding. This study surmises that the consequences of these choices impact perceptions of customer outcomes. Using social exchange theory, the purpose of this article is to examine the internal relational antecedents and perceptions of external customer outcomes of evasive knowledge hiding, as well as the moderating effects of pushover manager and environmental dynamism.

A moderated mediation model was used to analyze survey data from 234 business-to-business salespeople.

Internal competition and coworkers’ past opportunistic behavior increase evasive knowledge hiding. These effects are attenuated if the manager is not a pushover. Evasive knowledge hiding decreases perceptions of external customer outcomes, particularly at low levels of environmental dynamism.

Data was collected from salespeople, which presents a look from perpetrators themselves. While directly observing salespeople was the goal, sourcing and matching customer and manager data would only strengthen the results.

Salespeople evasively hide their knowledge if it is in their best interest, which may unwittingly hurt perceptions of customer outcomes.

This study formally introduces salesperson evasive knowledge hiding into the marketing and sales literature. The research highlights the dark side of social exchange theory by demonstrating how internal coworker relationships affect perceptions of external customer relationships via evasive knowledge hiding. This study also introduces pushover manager as an enabling moderating variable.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the emotional labor strategies of service employees differently influence the level of their creativity, and whether creative employees consequently benefit from that creativity in terms of achieving a high level of job performance.

The authors surveyed flight attendants from an airline in South Korea. The authors distributed 150 questionnaires to flight attendants, received 126 responses, and finally obtained 119 usable data. The authors used Mplus 7.13 to evaluate validity and test the hypotheses.

Whereas employees using deep acting were found to be less emotionally exhausted and more affectively committed toward their organization, which produced a high level of creativity, those who selected surface acting were shown to suffer more emotional exhaustion and have less affective commitment, which generated a low level of creativity. Customer service personnel behaving creatively resulted in superior official job performance appraisals.

This study makes distinct contributions to the literature by proposing emotional labor as the key antecedent of employee creativity in service organizations, by confirming emotional exhaustion and affective commitment as the motivational mechanisms through which emotional labor strategies influence service employee creativity, and by suggesting the value of employee creativity.

Anchored in a social control theory framework, this study aims to investigate the mediating effect of defensive silence in the relationship between employees' perception of supervisor ostracism and their creative performance, as well as the buffering role of proactivity in this process.

The hypotheses were tested using three-wave survey data collected from employees in North American organizations.

The authors found that an important reason for supervisor ostracism adversely affecting employee creativity is their observance of defensive silence. This mechanism, in turn, is less prominent among employees who show agency and change-oriented behavior (i.e. proactivity).

For practitioners, this study identifies defensive silence as a key mechanism through which supervisor ostracism hinders employee creativity. Further, this process is less likely to escalate when their proactivity makes them less vulnerable to experience such social exclusion.

This study establishes a more complete understanding of the connection between supervisor ostracism and employee creativity, with particular attention to mediating mechanism of defensive silence and the moderating role of proactivity in this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the roles that service employees’ responses to high job demands play in service innovation, by examining the effects that service employees’ motivational orientation in self-regulation (regulatory focus) and their emotional labour strategy have on their creativity.

By integrating regulatory focus theory and emotion regulation theory, the authors developed a theoretical model to propose the links between promotion and prevention regulatory foci, different emotional labour strategies and frontline employee creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear model based on data collected from 304 frontline employees and 72 supervisors in 51 restaurants.

The results showed that promotion focus was positively related to frontline employee creativity while prevention focus was negatively related to it. In addition, both emotional labour strategies (deep acting and surface acting) mediated the effect of promotion focus on frontline employee creativity. Surface acting mediated the effect of prevention focus on frontline employee creativity.

This is the first research conducted to explain, from a self-regulatory perspective, the influence that is exerted on service employees’ service innovation by their responses to high job demands. The findings identify the effects that service employees’ promotion focus or prevention focus in self-regulation have on their creativity, and the data unravel the role of emotional labour strategy as the mediating mechanism that explains the influence of regulatory focus on service employee creativity. On the basis of the findings, managerial directions are offered with regard to managing service employees’ regulatory focus and emotional labour, with a view to enhancing the creativity and innovation within a service organisation.

This study aimed to examine the effect of self-efficacy on job performance through creativity. We predicted that exposure to customer incivility and rigid service scripts will moderate the mediating effect of creativity on the relationship between self-efficacy and job performance.

Survey data were collected from 397 salespersons who were working in a department store in South Korea. The PROCESS macro was used to test the study hypotheses.

The results revealed that the positive relationship between self-efficacy and job performance was partially mediated by creativity. Furthermore, exposure to customer incivility and rigid service scripts weakened the positive effects of self-efficacy on creativity. Finally, customer incivility and rigid service scripts also dampened the positive effects of self-efficacy on job performance through creativity.

Sales organizations should understand that the extent to which self-efficacy improves job performance by enhancing creativity is contingent on the extent to which salespersons are exposed to customer incivility and are required to adhere to rigid service scripts in the workplace.

Our findings paint a more complete portrait of the beneficial effects of self-efficacy. Specifically, they suggest that the development of creativity is an important mechanism that underlies the process by which internal resources enhance job performance and that customer incivility and service scripts weaken this relationship.