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Adopting the transformative service research (TSR) perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of positive customer feedback on the well-being of front-line employees, companies, and society. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the overlooked area of “positive feedback” is explored resulting in the development of the “Positive Feedback Model” (PFM). The study also compares managers’ and employees’ perceptions of positive customer feedback.

Two exploratory qualitative studies were conducted: Study 1 consisted of 22 semi-structured interviews with managers working in the service industry and Study 2 consisted of seven focus groups with front-line service employees. The extensive literature review and the results of these two studies contributed to the development of the PFM.

Positive customer feedback is an overlooked area of service research which offers potential for improving the well-being of the service entities. Front-line employees are the main recipients and topics of positive customer feedback. The developed PFM describes various forms, channels, and times of administration of positive customer feedback and its multitude of impacts on the well-being of service entities.

This study contributes to the literature on TSR and customer feedback management. The developed model presents possible positive feedback categories, their various outcomes and the outcomes for the concerned parties involved. By developing PFM and encouraging a multidisciplinary approach combined with advanced research methodologies, the researchers propose an agenda for further research insights within the TSR and customer feedback areas. The comparison of the managers’ and employees’ perceptions of positive customer feedback presents novel managerial implications and directions for future research.

This study is the first to explore customer feedback from a TSR perspective. It examines the overlooked area of positive customer feedback. The well-being of service entities is prioritized as services have been extensively criticized for ignoring human well-being.

By drawing on leader–member exchange theory, this study aims to understand the relationship between job autonomy, transformational leadership and psychological well-being mediated by job satisfaction among front-line employees in Chinese commercial banks.

A cross-sectional study which consists of 96 respondents from 5 Chinese commercial banks is conducted.

Through data analysis, the results reveal that transformational leadership and job autonomy are significantly positively related to job satisfaction and directly related to the psychological well-being of front-line employees in Chinese commercial banks. Another interesting finding is that there is a mean difference between male and female front-line employees in Chinese commercial banks on the preference of job autonomy and transformational leadership.

The current study offers further evidence for which strategies Chinese commercial banks should adopt to enhance and protect the rights of front-line employees’ psychological well-being. As front-line employees in commercial banks play a vital role in contributing to bank profits and operational efficiency. They are not only the employees for making profits but also have the right to experience the psychological well-being as a human. Employees with a high level of job satisfaction and psychological well-being benefit both their own health and organizational performance in the long run.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of work‐family conflict, emotional exhaustion, and intrinsic motivation on front‐line employees' job performance, job satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment in Turkish retail banks as its setting.

A total number of 363 usable questionnaires were personally retrieved from front‐line employees in the research location. The relevant writings were canvassed in order to design the survey instrument. The hypothesized relationships were tested using LISREL 8.30 through path analysis.

Results reveal that work‐family conflict increased emotional exhaustion and decreased job satisfaction. Intrinsic motivation was found to exert a significant negative impact on emotional exhaustion. Results demonstrate that high levels of intrinsic motivation resulted in high levels of job performance, job satisfaction, and affective commitment to the organization. The empirical results also indicate that emotional exhaustion exerted a significant negative effect on job satisfaction. As hypothesized, high levels of job performance led to increased job satisfaction. However, work‐family conflict and emotional exhaustion did not have any significant effects on job performance and affective organizational commitment. As expected, the empirical results provided support for the significant positive effects of job performance and job satisfaction on affective organizational commitment.

Job performance was operationalized via self‐report measure. In future research, incorporating non‐work variables such as family, leisure and life satisfaction into the research model would shed further light on one's understanding about the relationships of work‐family conflict and emotional exhaustion with those variables.

Top managements of banks should be committed to establishing and maintaining family‐supportive work environments. By doing so, properly trained bank managers can create a culture that helps front‐line employees balance work requirements with non‐work responsibilities. In addition, these managers should provide ongoing training programs, which aim to teach front‐line employees how to manage time effectively and resolve problems associated with work‐family conflict and emotional exhaustion.

The present study makes useful additions to the current knowledge base by investigating the effects of work‐family conflict and intrinsic motivation on emotional exhaustion and the effects of work‐family conflict and emotional exhaustion on various job outcomes of front‐line bank employees in a developing economy.

This paper aims to study front-line employees’ contribution to service innovation, when they contribute and how they are involved in service innovation.

The paper draws on a multiple-case study on service innovation in four organizations with extensive front-line employee involvement. The main data collection methods are interviews and observations.

The paper suggests that front-line employees contribute customer knowledge, product knowledge and practice knowledge during five phases of the service innovation process – project formation, idea generation, service design, testing and implementation – and that front-line employee involvement ranges from active to passive.

Statistical generalization of the results is needed.

The paper reveals that early and active front-line employee involvement in the service innovation process creates conditions for a positive contribution to service innovation.

The paper suggests that early and active knowledge contributions by front-line employees to the service innovation process are associated with the creation of attractive value propositions.

Service recovery strategies are efforts used by organizations to bring back dissatisfied customers to a state of satisfaction with the organization. It has been argued that successful service recovery by organizations is dependent on the effectiveness of front line employees. The purpose of this paper is to examine a model of service recovery performance (SRP) of front line employees in the retail industry in Ghana.

The study uses personally administered survey data collected from 136 employees in 20 micro and small retail enterprises in Ghana. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis is used to test the direct and interactive effects of organizational variables such as perceived managerial attitudes and work environment factors on the SRP of front line employees.

The findings indicate that the SRP is influenced by employee empowerment, interaction between customer service orientation and empowerment, interaction between customer service orientation and training for customer service excellence, and the interaction between empowerment and training for customer service excellence.

Focussing only on the antecedents of SRP, and using cross-sectional data based on the self-assessments of the front line employees from one country.

Empowering front line employees to deal with service failures should be combined with training them in job related and behavioral skills to attend to the needs of customers. Moreover, it is critical to combine perceived customer service orientation with training front line employees in job related and behavioral skills.

First study to examine the antecedents of SRP of front line employees in a sub-Saharan African environment. Moreover, study examines the interactive effects of organizational and work environment variables on SRP.

This paper aims to undertake a simultaneous assessment of interdependence in the behaviours of front-line and back-office employees and their joint effect on customer-related organisational performance. It also tests for a moderating influence of the emotional intelligence of front-line salespeople and back-office employees.

The sample comprises 105 front-line sales employees and 77 back-office employees. The customer-related organisational performance data come from a UK business-to-business (B2B) electronics company. With these triadic data, this study uses partial least squares to estimate the measurement and structural models.

Salespeople’s customer orientation directly affects customer-related organisational performance; the relationship is moderated by salespeople’s emotional intelligence. The emotional intelligence of salespeople also directly affects the customer-directed citizenship behaviour of back-office employees. Furthermore, the emotional intelligence of back-office staff moderates the link between the emotional intelligence of salespeople and back-office staff citizenship behaviour. Back-office staff citizenship behaviour, in turn, affects customer-related organisational performance.

The emotions deployed by employees in interactions with customers clearly shape customers’ perceptions of service quality, as well as employee-level performance outcomes. However, prior literature lacks insights into the simultaneous effects of front-line and back-office employee behaviour, especially in B2B settings. This paper addresses these research gaps by investigating triadic relationships – among back-office employees, front-line employees and customer outcomes – in a B2B setting, where they are of particular managerial interest.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit discussions on managerial work, seeking to re-examine the front-line service manager’s position within the service triangle, and bring forward questions of agency that remain under-developed by scholars. Challenging the assumed unitarist and “consensus” standing point in organizations it recognizes that front-line managers, similarly to their subordinates, resist corporate demands and unveils stories of “battles” and disengagement towards their role, providing a rich empirical agenda regarding managerial misbehaviour. In order to explore front-line managers’ agency issues, the paper adopts the framework of the dimensions of misbehaviour, as developed by Ackroyd and Thompson (1999), to capture and to better describe and understand the recalcitrant agential practices by front-line managers.

The paper calls on qualitative data from two case study organizations in the Cyprus food-retail sector. In total, 46 interviews took place with participants across different departments and different management levels. This aimed for a better and deeper understanding of the research problem through understanding of the different perspectives.

The evidence reveals the intensification of FLSMs’ work and their feelings of pressure. FLSMs, however, did not stay apathetic and have utilized tactics to oppose the increasing workload and the expansion of their role. The paper classifies these tactics using the four dimensions of misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999), namely, appropriation of time; work, product and identity. It shows that FLSMs not only resist corporate demands, like their subordinates, but also devised practices which are similar to workers. The data also reveal a variety in actions of misbehaviour between FLSMs depending on the level of customer interaction and their mobility on the shop floor.

Students of managerial work overlooked the political realities of management and the contested nature of (front-line service) management work. As this study has shown FLSMs across the shop floor strongly identify more with “front-line employees” than senior management, protecting their own interests within the employment relationship via oppositional actions and disengagement. FLSM is, of course, in an agency relationship with capital; however, this neglects the heterogeneity in interests at different levels of management. This paper shifts the focus of management research away from the traditional agency argument and discusses FLSMs as “misbehaving agents”. It challenges the assumed unitarist and “consensus” standing point for FLSMs in organizations and calls HRM scholars to embrace a pluralist analysis in line management research.

This research shows that FLSMs misbehave as an expression of discontent towards the expansion and intensification of their role. Yet, the data reveal variation in the organization of FLSMs’ work across the shop floor and consequently variation in their actions of misbehaviour. This suggests that it is erroneous to presume a similar labour process for these managers and/or over-generalize their battling actions. HR practitioners will need to re-examine the roles of FLSMs in organizations, recognize the variety of interests within management, step away from rhetoric discourses of unproblematic devolvement of HR and managerial tasks to the front-line and appropriately review, redesign and re-organize front-line managerial work.

Although research has fruitfully located the powerlessness of front-line managers as a central theme in their analysis, the complexity of the front-line management position within the social relations of interactive service work and their “logic of action” within their labour process remains a relatively marginal theme in research. Indeed, FLSMs’ position within the triangle, where managerial work is subject to degradation and trilateral conflicting dynamics and their battles within their own labour process, still remains under-explored. This study addresses this research lacuna focusing on the FLSMs’ experiences on the front-end and their actions of misbehaviour within their labour process.

The paper brings forward questions of agency that remain under-developed by scholars and unveils “stories of battles”. It discusses FLSMs as “misbehaving agents” a question that is only superficially addressed in resistance and managerial studies. This paper challenges the embedded HRM unitarist assumption that FLSMs are conscientiously agents of the capital and reveals evidence suggesting the plurality of interests across management. HRM scholars, especially those discussed line managers as HRM partners, have overestimated FLSMs’ identification with senior management and the strategic goals of the organization. As this study has shown FLSMs across the shop floor strongly identify with “front-line employees”, protecting their own interests within the employment relationship via oppositional actions and disengagement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a multidimensional model of marketing culture and performance in tourism restaurants operating in Jordan. The paper introduces a model proposing certain associations between Webster’s (1990) marketing culture dimensions and attempts to underline how such associations affect restaurants’ performance.

A structured and self-administered survey was used, targeting managers and employees of tourism restaurants operating in Jordan. A sample of 334 tourism restaurants’ managers and employees were involved in the survey. A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the research constructs dimensions, unidimensionality, validity and composite reliability. Structural path model analysis was also used to test the hypothesised interrelationships of the research model.

The empirical findings indicate that the marketing culture dimensions are seven rather than six, as proposed by Webster’s (1990) original model: service quality, interpersonal relationships, management–front-line interaction, selling task, organisation, internal communication and innovativeness. “Organisation” had positively and significantly affected “interpersonal relationships”. “Interpersonal relationships” had positively and significantly affected each of “management–front-line interaction”, “selling task” and “internal communications”. On the other hand, each of “management–front-line interaction”, “selling task” and “internal communications” had positively and significantly affected “innovativeness”. However, “innovativeness” itself had positively and significantly affected each of “service quality” and restaurant performance. Finally, “service quality” had positively and significantly affected restaurants’ performance.

Only seven dimensions of marketing culture were examined; meanwhile, there could also be other dimensions that affect restaurants’ performance. This paper has also examined the effect of a multidimensional model of marketing culture on restaurants’ financial performance only; the use of other types of non-financial measures could yield different results. The fact that paper’s sample consisted only of Jordanian restaurants further limits its generalisation potential.

The paper reinforces the importance of sound marketing culture to Jordanian tourism restaurants. It further underlines the importance of several marketing culture dimensions, particularly those related to employees’ selection, development and communication. Further, the paper emphasises the particular importance of front-office employees to the success of Jordanian restaurants. Tourism restaurants’ managers and executives can benefit from such findings for designing their marketing culture strategies to achieve long-term performance objectives.

This paper represents the first empirical attempt to examine the interrelationships between marketing culture dimensions introduced by Webster (1990). Accordingly, it should shed more light on the dynamics of marketing culture within service organisations, and how such dynamics affect organisations’ performance. Further, the paper is the first of its kind to study marketing culture dynamics in the context of Jordanian tourism restaurants industry. International tourism restaurants planning to expand their operations in Jordan’s tourism industry have now valuable empirical evidence concerning the marketing culture dimensions and their effect on performance.

Literature on the services industry's front‐line employees has largely focused on the relationships between service providers and customers. However, there is increasing approbation that managers influence the front‐line employees' motivation, ultimately impacting service quality. This study investigates the relationship between front‐line employees' perceived managerial sincerity, need for feedback, and role motivation.

The data were collected at 26 restaurants (from a global fast‐food franchised chain) located in a large US city, using a self‐administered questionnaire, from their front‐line employees. The final sample size was 185 (47.4 percent response).

The results suggest a positive association between front‐line employees’ feedback‐seeking orientation and their perceived managerial sincerity. A positive association also exists between front‐line employees' motivation levels and their job satisfaction.

The focus on a subset of restaurants (from a single franchise system) and the limited scope of states‐of‐mind and behaviors measured are two main limitations. A multitude of other front‐line employee characteristics and factors should be investigated in future studies.

Results suggest that managers' interpersonal communication techniques enhance front‐line employees' perceptions of managerial sincerity, and increase their motivation and job satisfaction. However, managers need to balance a portfolio of diverse employee traits with relevant managerial styles to achieve desired outcomes.

The association between perceived managerial sincerity and feedback‐seeking orientation is intuitively appealing and comforting. However, some employees are happy being told what to do without any concern for involvement. Employees with low perceived managerial sincerity are also low on feedback need.

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.