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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of what (service) experience is and examine it using three distinct perspectives: customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and human experience (HX).

The present conceptualization blends the marketing and organizational behavior/human resources management (OB/HRM) disciplines to clarify and reflect over the meaning of (service) experience. The marketing discipline illuminates the concept of CX, whereas the OB/HRM discipline illuminates the concept of EX. The concept of HX, which transcends CX and EX, is examined in light of its recent development in service research. For each of the three concepts, key themes are identified, and future research directions are proposed.

Because the goal that individuals seek to achieve depends on the role they are enacting, each of the three perspectives on experience (CX, EX and HX) should have a different focal point. CX requires to focus on the process of solving customer goals. EX necessitates to think in terms of organizational context and job content that support employees. Finally, the focus of HX should be on well-being via enhanced gratification, and reduced violation, of basic human needs.

This paper offers an interdisciplinary perspective on (service) experience and simultaneously addresses CX, EX and HX in order to reconcile the different perspectives on experience in service research.

This study aims to examine the interaction effects of chatbots’ language style and customers’ decision-making journey stage on customer’s service encounter satisfaction and the mediating role of customer perception of emotional support and informational support using the construal level theory and social support theory as conceptual frameworks.

This study used a scenario-based experiment with a 2 (chatbot’s language style: abstract language vs concrete language) × 2 (decision-making journey stage: informational stage vs transactional stage) between-subjects design.

Findings show that during the informational stage, chatbots that use abstract language style exert a strong influence on service encounter satisfaction through emotional support. During the transactional stage, chatbots that use concrete language style exert a strong impact on service encounter satisfaction through informational support.

Findings provide some suggestions for improving customer–chatbot interaction quality during online service encounters.

This study offers a novel perspective on customer interaction experience with chatbots by investigating the chatbot’s language styles at different decision-making journey stages.

Pandemics are frequent events, and the impact of each pandemic makes a strong and long-term effect on companies and markets. Given the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to investigate the crisis from a different perspective to know how companies have sustained growth in markets. The purpose of this paper is to understand how profit-oriented customer-centric companies (small, medium and large) have responded and adapted to COVID-19 crisis, using the complexity theory.

Drawing upon the complexity theory, a humble attempt is made to develop theoretical propositions by conceptualizing companies as complex adaptive systems. The paper examines companies from three dimensions (i.e. internal mechanism, environment and coevolution).

Companies self-organize, emerge into new states and become adaptive to the changing environment. Companies create knowledge to understand the dynamic anatomy and design survival and growth strategies during and post COVID-19 era. Complex adaptive systems perspective provides companies with insights to deal with complex issues raised due to COVID-19 pandemic. They can handle the impact of pandemic efficiently with complex adaptive systems by developing and implementing appropriate strategies post-COVID-19.

The study reveals how companies evolve and emerge into as complex adaptive systems to adapt themselves to the highly dynamic environment, which are uncertain, unpredictable, nonlinear and multifaceted, in the context of COVID-19. Implications for theory and practice of viewing companies as complex adaptive systems and coevolving structures in the COVID-19 context are discussed.

This study aims to examine the influence of perceived organizational support (POS) on boundary-spanning behaviors (BSBs) among frontline employees in the hospitality industry. It also considered perceived supervisory support (PSS) as a moderating factor within a conceptual model.

Data were gathered from 651 full-time hospitality employees across 12 hotels in China. The analysis of the data used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The findings revealed that POS influences hospitality boundary spanners’ BSBs, specifically external representation (ER), internal influence (II) and service delivery (SD). In addition, PSS moderates the relationship between POS and these frontline employees’ behaviors.

This study offers practical strategies for hospitality professionals to enhance frontline employees’ BSBs and foster supportive workplaces that drive employee excellence. These strategies encompass cultivating a supportive organizational culture, implementing supportive measures, fostering a sense of belonging among employees and ensuring supervisors’ well-being and competence in supporting their teams during daily interactions. These actions effectively motivate customer-contact employees to excel in their performance.

Fostering a helpful attitude in frontline employees is crucial for service firms’ success. Hospitality organizations must provide support to achieve this. Few studies have explored how organizational support contributes positively to the BSBs of customer-contact employees. This study goes beyond oversimplification and delves into the nuanced interplay between perceived support (POS and PSS) and hospitality frontline employees’ BSBs, focusing on ER, II and SD. The moderated mediating model enhances the understanding of support dynamics in the organizational context.

This study aims to clarify why and when digital business strategy (DBS) helps manufacturing firms generate value co-creation (VC) with different stakeholders in the digital context of China. This study considers external network capability (ENC) and internal network capability (INC) as mediation mechanism, and strategic flexibility (SF) as theoretical boundary.

Questionnaires were used and filled out by executives from manufacturing firms. The manufacturing samples from 289 different fields in China were used for hypothesis testing, and the structural equation model was the main analytical method.

This study found that DBS of manufacturing enterprises has a positive impact on VC. Specifically, DBS affects firm-partner VC and firm-consumer VC through the indirect positive effect of ENC, and affects firm-employee VC through INV. The positive effects of ENC on firm-partner VC and firm-consumer VC, as well as INC on firm-employee VC, are weak at high (or low) SF, and are strongest at moderate SF.

This study provides manufacturing firms with practical insights into why and when they can implement DBS to generate VC, with a particular emphasis on the weighted role of SF.

This study spotlights gaps in the literature on why and when manufacturing firms can reap the benefits of DBS, focusing on one important business outcome – VC. The authors clarify the mediating role of differences in ENC and INC, as well as the inverted U-shaped moderating role of SF.

This study aims to explore the drivers (i.e. service innovation, service exchange, customer wellbeing and employee wellbeing) and organizational culture in the service ecosystem in the hospitality sector.

This study adopted a quantitative approach by collecting data from employees and customers of the top 10 hotels (identified from three major websites, i.e. Goibibo, Trivago and MakeMyTrip) functional in Jammu city, North India. Exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and partial least square analysis are used to analyse the data.

The study findings reveal that among the four drivers (i.e., service innovation, service exchange, employee wellbeing and customer wellbeing) customer wellbeing shows a strong impact and significant impact on the service ecosystem. Following this, the study also exhibits that organizational culture significantly moderates the relationship between service innovation and the service ecosystem. However, it does not show any moderating influence among the other drivers of the service ecosystem.

This study is conducted only in the top 10 hotels (three and four stars) of Jammu city, North India, which might not represent all Indian hotels.

The study contributes by establishing the role of four service ecosystem drivers, namely service innovation, service exchange, employee wellbeing and customer wellbeing. Following this, the study empirically tested and validated the service ecosystem framework in the context of north Indian hotels. The study also establishes the significant role of organizational culture, particularly group culture and hierarchy culture, in strengthening the service ecosystem.

Sailing toward sustainability is becoming the strategic focus of shipping firms. Drawing on organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we investigated the impact of digital transformation (DT) on shipping firms’ sustainable management performance and the boundary conditions guiding this relationship.

The authors examined the hypotheses by employing hierarchical linear modeling on two-wave time-lagged data from 189 shipping firm employees in China.

The results suggest that a shipping firm’s DT is positively associated with its sustainable management performance and that the relationship is strengthened by having better cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms. Furthermore, our three-way interaction analyses show that while injunctive norms in a shipping firm’s networks can strengthen the contingency roles of both cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms, descriptive norms alone significantly influence customer coordination.

Drawing on organizational information processing and planned behavior theories, the present research provides new insights into leveraging DT for sailing toward sustainable success. Moreover, this study extends the current understandings of the boundary conditions of the relationship between DT and sustainable management performance by showing the two-way and three-way interaction effects of coordination mechanisms and subjective norms. The findings of the present research can be utilized as effective strategies for promoting sustainable management performance.

The present study examines the effect of supervisor incivility on service employee creativity and the mediating mechanism of negative affect state on the said relationship with the aid of Affective Events Theory (AET) and Social Power Theory. Additionally, the study explores the mitigating role of core self-evaluation in the dual stage of the moderated mediation model.

Survey data were collected from 420 frontline employees working in four-star and five-star hotels across India and PROCESS macro in SPSS 23.0 was employed to test the hypotheses proposed in the study.

The study findings observe that frontline employees experiencing supervisor incivility face a negative affect state and it further diminishes service employee creativity. Also, the indirect effect gets attenuated at dual stages when frontline employees are equipped with a high level of core self-evaluation.

The study findings provide various insights to the managers to understand the deleterious effect of supervisor incivility at work and to develop interventions to manage supervisor incivility and the negative affect state among frontline hotel employees.

The present study is the first and unique attempt to investigate the role of supervisor incivility experienced by frontline hotel employees in India with reference to their creativity towards customers and mediating mechanism of negative affect state. The study adds value to the literature by establishing the role of core self-evaluation in the moderated mediation model. Further, the study also provides a unique contribution to the management of frontline hospitality employees.

In this study, to empirically test the relationship between ethical organizational climate, inner life (IL) and life satisfaction (LS) of employees, a field study was conducted on white-collar personnel working in the service sector in the Istanbul region. The main purpose was to extract an approach that could be applied to simultaneously boost LS and customer orientation for effective service delivery by organizations.

A two-wave time-lagged survey design was used to collect the data over a period of three months. Two sets of self-administrated survey questionnaires were developed for both waves, containing the details of the study and items for measuring variables. The questionnaires were developed in such a manner that the anonymity of the respondents and ethical considerations remained intact. In the first wave, data were collected for two variables, i.e. organizational ethical climate and IL. The measurement scale for organizational ethical climate was adapted from the study of DeBode et al. (2013) and for IL from the study of Fry et al. (2017). In the second wave, data on the remaining two variables (LS and organizational customer orientation) were collected. Direct effects and indirect effects in the hypotheses were tested by structural equation modeling (SEM).

This study has found that the organizational ethical climate strengthens the inner lives of employees, which is vital for the organizations from two angles: one, strong IL of an employee enhances his/her own LS and two, stronger IL accentuates customer orientation.

The fact that the context of this study is limited to Turkey and that the participants are selected from among white-collar personnel working in the service sector reduces the representativeness of the research result. In this sense, in the next stages, the model of the research can be retested in different industries or cross-cultural studies can be designed by comparing the study results with samples from different geographies, so that the validity of these relations for different cultures can be seen.

The implications of this study revealed that employees will enjoy their lives more when authorities in organizations adopt organizational policies supporting the inner lives of employees, feel respect for their private areas and make the organizational climate more ethical. Hence, with practices such as workplace spirituality or spiritual leadership that support the inner lives of employees, the motivation and satisfaction of employees can be increased.

This study revealed that inner life strength makes people comparative more ethical in their dealings, which gives them a sense of achievement and enhances work meaningfulness, boosting LS and customer-orientation. The findings of this study are vital for leaders, as they can achieve a conjoint elevation of the LS of their employees and enhance customer orientation for higher organizational performance.

This study is original in emphasizing the positive effect of spiritually powerful inner-life customer-orientedness in employees with empirical proof.

This study aims to investigate the potential positive correlation between inclusive leadership and hotel frontline employees’ (FLEs) customer stewardship (CS) behavior, using the conservation of resource theory as its foundation. It hypothesizes that role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) acts as a mediating factor in this relationship, with employee conscientiousness serving as a significant moderating variable.

A time-lagged survey design was used, spanning over three rounds to collect data from 348 hotel FLEs and 42 managers. The analysis was conducted using structural equation modeling in Mplus version 8.6.

The study revealed a positive association between inclusive leadership and FLE CS, both directly and indirectly through RBSE. The results also showed that FLE conscientiousness moderated the direct link between inclusive leadership and RBSE, as well as the indirect link between inclusive leadership and FLE CS.

The evidence suggests that inclusive leadership behaviors among hospitality managers may elevate FLE CS behaviors, implying significant benefits for the success of hospitality organizations. Managers should focus on enhancing FLEs’ RBSE to further improve CS behaviors. In addition, by considering FLE conscientiousness, managers can craft targeted strategies to maximize the impact of inclusive leadership on CS behaviors.

This research contributes to the limited body of knowledge on the precursors of CS behavior by explaining both direct and indirect connections with inclusive leadership. Furthermore, it broadens the understanding of the conditions under which leadership most effectively shapes such behaviors.