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Integrating conservation of resources (COR) and complexity theories, this study aims to develop and assess a research model of the relationship between job dissatisfaction and brand sabotage behavior (BSB) based on the moderating mechanism of psychological resources (i.e. brand-based role identity and relational energy). The interdependence between these influencing factors is analyzed from the perspective of social science holism.

A total of 381 valid questionnaires were collected from frontliners serving in full-service restaurants in Guangzhou, China. Regression analysis was used to test the research hypotheses and combined with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the complex triggering mechanism of BSB.

Job dissatisfaction is positively related to BSB, brand-based role identity internalization and relational energy weaken this effect, whereas brand-based role identity compliance strengthens it. Qualitative comparative analysis shows that a single condition does not constitute a necessary condition for BSB. The interdependence of job dissatisfaction and employee psychological resources forms multiple asymmetric paths that trigger high and low BSB.

The findings can be used by catering organizations as guidelines for conducting training for brand internalization, formulating strategies to avoid BSB among employees and strengthening brand building.

This study is the first to integrate COR and complexity theories to comprehensively analyze how BSB is formed among dissatisfied employees. The authors advance theory by distinguishing the role of brand psychological resources (i.e. brand-based role identity) and psychological resources obtained from the environment (i.e. relational energy) in stimulating or buffering dissatisfied employees to engage in BSB.

This paper aims to explore front line employee performance in retail banking and presents distinct components of employee performance, including extra‐role and sabotage behaviours.

Data was collected from Irish bank employees. Usable responses were received from 404 respondents and subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to undertake a confirmatory factor analysis of the emergent five‐factor model.

Results indicate front line employee performance is multi‐faceted and comprised of civility, assurance and reliability, customer orientation, as well as extra‐role behaviour and anti‐role behaviour, or sabotage.

This exploratory study focuses on the Irish banking sector. To explore the generalisabilty of results, replication studies among other samples of branch banking employees in other countries are in order. Moreover, our survey is limited to the views of branch employees. We advocate research among bank managers and customers to triangulate potentially divergent views about performance.

Findings have implications for recruitment, training and rewards. To ensure new hires are service minded, managers must consider their potential for extra‐role or sabotage behaviour. Employees who demonstrate extra‐role behaviours must be rewarded to encourage the adoption of such behaviours. Managers must also seek to minimise job stress in order to curtail anti‐role behaviours.

This paper offers insights into employees' views about their own performance at the front line. It extends the conceptualisation of service quality, by considering extra‐role behaviour and sabotage as components of employee performance.

Reflecting a behavioral orientation specific to leaders in Confucian-based cultures, paternalistic leadership appears relevant to the Vietnamese business context. Taking healthcare organizations in Vietnam as a source of data collection, the purpose of this paper is to seek an insight into the relationship between paternalistic leadership and idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) among clinical members.

The data were harvested from 1,182 clinical employees and 168 direct supervisors from 19 hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

The data analysis revealed that authoritarian leadership behaviors displayed a weak negative link with employees’ i-deals, while the benevolence and morality dimensions of paternalistic leadership exhibited positive relationships with i-deals. The research results also provide evidence for the roles of organizational identification and role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) in mediating the relationships between paternalistic leadership dimensions and i-deals. The current study also verified the utility of employees’ flexible role identity as an enhancer of both the relationship between organizational identification and i-deals, as well as of the relationship between RBSE and i-deals.

This study extends the leadership literature by unveiling the role of paternalistic leadership in fostering i-deals among clinicians through organizational identification and RBSE as dual mediation paths as well as flexible role identity as a moderator of the relationship between both organizational identification and RBSE and i-deals.

Customer orientation of service employees relates to customer satisfaction and loyalty, sales growth and business performance. Drawing from conservation of resources (COR) theory, the aim of this study was to test the interactive effects of service employees' role clarity and learning goal orientation on customer orientation. Specifically, it was hypothesized that even under conditions of low role clarity, service employees with high learning goal orientation would maintain a high level of customer orientation.

Participants were 323 employees of 4- and 5-star hotels in Singapore. Using questionnaires, they reported their role clarity, learning goal orientation and customer orientation. For hypothesis testing, moderated regression analysis was performed.

Role clarity and learning goal orientation were significantly related to customer orientation, and in support of the hypothesis, the interaction effect of role clarity and learning goal orientation was also significant. With high role clarity, all employees showed high customer orientation. But with low role clarity, only employees with high learning goal orientation demonstrated high customer orientation.

The recommendations from this study are to include learning goal orientation as a selection criterion for service employees and to clearly define the roles of existing service employees, especially for those with low learning goal orientation.

The originality and value of this study lies in highlighting the importance of learning goal orientation especially under conditions of low role clarity.

Service research has highlighted the role of emotional labor in service delivery but has neglected service employees’ actions. This study aims to distinguish between the recurrent in-role and extra-role actions of service employees and to examine the joint effect of service employees’ actions and their emotional labor, which may color these actions on customer buying behavior (number of purchased items and total bill).

Phase I comprised two studies: Study 1 examined 70 service interaction videos to identify employees’ service actions, and Study 2 quantitatively validated the most frequent employee actions, used for further study, by examining 40 employee–customer interactions in fashion stores. For Phase II, Study 3 derived data from 60 service employees’ diaries to predict the joint effect of performed emotional labor and service actions on customer buying behavior.

Findings revealed that emotional labor moderated the relationship between service actions and customer buying behavior. The relationship between in-role/extra-role actions and buying behavior was stronger in the lower surface-acting (less emotional faking) condition, whereas the relationship between in-role/extra-role actions and buying behavior was stronger for the higher deep-acting (more emotionally authentic) condition.

Service organizations should not limit training to the more easily attained service actions. This possibility may be lacking if it ignores the emotional component that accompanied the action. This may shift the focus from customer satisfaction to customer delight.

This study is a pioneering effort to examine the specific circumstances in which service employees’ actions (regardless of in-role or extra-role status) will not produce the desired customer-related outcome in the presence of emotional labor.

The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of the service orientation on bank-employee behaviors; to empirically examine the moderating role of the productivity orientation in an effort to explain when and why the simultaneous pursuit of the service orientation and the productivity orientation negatively affect the financial service employee psychological empowerment; and to explore any contextual factors that can suppress or facilitate the bank–employee behaviors.

A single cross-sectional descriptive design was used for this study. Purposive sampling was used to identify the respondents who were bank employees in financial-service-sector organizations in South Korea. To analyze the data, a confirmatory-factor analysis (CFA) using LISREL 8.5 was employed. Conditional process modeling was performed to test the moderated mediation and the moderated-mediation hypotheses.

The results showed a significant relationship between the service orientation and the frontline-employee behaviors, thereby establishing the psychological empowerment as an intervening mechanism. The findings also suggest that the moderating role of the productivity orientation weakened the positive effect of the service orientation on the bank-employee psychological empowerment. This research identifies the positive interactive effect of the customer power upon the psychological empowerment of the employee extra-role behavior. The task interdependence enhanced the link between the psychological empowerment and the employee in-role behavior.

The specific service sector that was chosen is retail banking. The cross-sectional nature of the data is considered a limitation; furthermore, the self-reported nature of the completed questionnaires might have resulted in the common method bias. Further research should be conducted to collect longitudinal data from other service sectors to verify the hypothesized relationship. Extensions into other sectors that differ in terms of the customer power degree and the task interdependence level could lead to a contingency framework that shows if and how the hypothesized linkages can be changed according to the contextual factors.

For managers who want or need to pursue the strategic goals of the service orientation and the productivity orientation simultaneously, this study offers useful insights into the management of the strategic dilemmas that stem from service-setting multi-goal pursuits from an employee perspective. Second, the significant positive relationships that were observed between the values of the overt customer power and the extra-role behavior suggest that constraining and influential customer behaviors are likely to produce a structured working environment that encourages the bank-employee extra-role behavior. Third, the results also suggest that the task structure (task interdependence) may influence the employee in-role behavior. Thus, managers should encourage an organizational sense of belonging for their employees and an understanding of the essential nature of the employee work role in terms of a competitive organizational performance.

In banking circumstances, stickiness on product orientation by cutting cost will deteriorate the level of customer service and will then reduce customer revenues. In this case, disgruntled staff and unhappy customers perceive that their interests are being sacrificed in the pursuit of greater productivity. In this situation, revenues may fall faster than the reduction in costs. Thus, it may be proven that the cost of the dual demands from these two orientation types outweigh the benefit. Bank executives may perceive organizational productivity orientation as being an easier and more evident tool to use for reducing cost, especially with the existence of tough competition. Critically, in addition to poor service quality, this study indicates that there is a side effect of productivity orientation practice. Thus, managers should use caution in the concurrent employment of the two types.

This study identified the reason for the negative service outcomes that result from the simultaneous pursuits of the service orientation and the productivity orientation. From an employee perspective, it might be proven that the costs of the dual-service and production-orientation demands may outweigh the benefits. Thus, this proposed research model, in which the frontline autonomy acted as a key mediator and the customer power and the task interdependence were salient moderators, has been shown as crucial in the transmission of the impacts of the service and the quality orientation, and in the blunting of the service-productivity trade-offs that are due to the employee’s perceived multi-goal orientations.

Customer‐contact employees are a critical asset of service organizations due to the interactive nature of service delivery. Customer‐contact employees are boundary spanners who attempt to serve both internal and external constituents. Attempting to serve two masters can result in role conflict and the present effort presents and tests a framework for understanding possible antecedents and consequences of such role conflict. Survey data collected from 200 telephone service employees in an insurance company revealed at least partial support for the following hypotheses: role conflict emerges when there is a discrepancy between what employees think customers expect of them and what they report management rewards them for doing; role conflict, in turn, is related to employee attitudinal (e.g. job satisfaction) and behavioral (e.g. absenteeism) outcomes; and role conflict mediates the relationship between service orientation discrepancy and employee outcomes. Implications of the results for the management of service employees and service quality are presented.

This research seeks to review extant organisational role theory (ORT) literature, and to identify issues that limit its usefulness to contemporary academics and practitioners alike.

A review of ORT literature was conducted in light of the issues surrounding the effective implementation of HR policies in the workplace. The paper was based on a review of the intersection between ORT and contemporary HR management, and explored using primary survey and semi‐structured interview data.

It was found that three assumptions underpinning classical ORT are inadequate to account for the array of roles enacted by employees and the manner in which they impact on working‐life. The research suggests that ORT needs to incorporate the key themes of “multi‐faceted employee”, “employer recognition/facilitation” and “compartmentalisation” into its assumptions in order to account for contemporary HRM issues.

This research is only exploratory in nature, and thus requires its findings to be verified in larger sample sizes, and amongst respondents from different cultures and industry categories.

This research has practical implications for HR managers wishing to employ effective role‐taking/WLB policies in their workplace. Current WLB issues are well established in the literature, and the reconceptualisation of ORT provides some insight into what might constitute the tenets of an effective WLB policy regime.

This paper provides an exploration of the contemporary HRM issues that need to be included in a reconceptualisation of ORT. This research would be of value to both academics (reconceptualising classical ORT) and practitioners (who would observe specific implications for the formulation of effective HR policies in the workplace).

The purpose of this empirical study is to develop an understanding of how human resource (HR) managers employed by organizations with an explicit sustainability agenda view employees as stakeholders, and to explore how such views are operationalized in HR policies and practices.

An interpretive approach using data from 35 semi-structured interviews was adopted for this study. Data were transcribed and analyzed using the Gioia methodology.

Comparison of approaches to sustainable human resource management (HRM) revealed three distinctive conceptualizations of employees with respect to the sustainability agenda – employees as a driving force for sustainability, employees as consumers of HR practices and employees as members of a community. Strong levels of integration between the HRM and sustainability agendas were only evidenced in those organizations where an attempt had been made to address all three roles simultaneously. Findings suggest that engagement with a sustainability agenda widens the remit of the HRM function, underscoring the importance of employees' roles as consumers of HR practices and as members of wider communities.

By addressing the integration of HRM with a sustainability agenda, this article helps practitioners recognize diversity among employees' roles and the varying associated needs. Examples of policy and practice initiatives that effectively address these needs are provided.

HRM has been widely criticized for overemphasizing shareholder value, thereby lacking in attention to the needs of other stakeholders, including employees. Findings from this study suggest the holistic approach advocated by a sustainability agenda can effectively quell these concerns.

Drawing on the paradox perspective and the Job Demands-Resources Model (JD-R), we investigate how paradoxical leadership behavior (PLB) affects employee adaptive performance.

Conducted a multi-wave field study with a sample of 64 leaders and 224 subordinates (study 1), and a quasi-experiment involving 156 participants (study 2). The collected data were analyzed using ANOVA and HLM techniques.

Both studies reveal that (1) PLB exhibits a positive association with employee adaptive performance, (2) employee paradox mindset and role stress partly mediated the relationship between PLB and employee adaptive performance, (3) the indirect effects of PLB on employee adaptive performance through employee paradox mindset and role stress are moderated by employee gender-role identity (GRI).

This research developed a moderated mediation model to examine the potential impact of PLB on employee adaptive performance, which contributes to the literature by integrating the paradox perspective and emphasizing the effectiveness of combining “top-down” and “bottom-up” leadership approaches. Moreover, we elucidate the underlying mechanisms through which PLB facilitates employees in effectively managing work role tensions to enhance adaptive performance Finally, this study also extends the investigation of the contextual efficacy of PLB by incorporating GRI as a moderator.