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Within the retail banking sector, the customer-centric business model has become an important and new business trend in recent years. The enhancement of the frontline service employees’ engagement and their customer-oriented behaviors are among the key factors affecting business performance (BP) in this sector of the banking industry. The purpose of this paper is to improve management decisions to enhance BP through examining the relationship between the frontline employees’ engagement and BP while taking into account the mediating effect of customer-oriented behaviors on this relationship.

A quantitative approach was adopted to conduct the present study, and the respondents were sampled from a large commercial bank in Iran using a structured questionnaire. Overall, 50 branch managers and 90 frontline employees were selected using random sampling. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to ascertain the validity and reliability of the observed items and a structural equation model was used for testing the proposed hypotheses and research framework.

The findings showed that customer-oriented behaviors mediated the relationship between the frontline employees’ engagement and bank’s branches’ BP. Higher levels of the frontline employees’ engagement enhance the customer-oriented behaviors. It was revealed that the frontline employees are engaged in their job and organization. Moreover, the engaged frontline employees listen carefully to customers, the customer’s problem is important to them and they complete their tasks precisely for customers. It has been confirmed that customer-oriented behaviors enhance branches’ BP. The bank frontline employees’ engagement and customer-oriented behaviors, in turn, affected the bank’s branches’ financial performance, process performance and employee performance compared with the bank’s key competitors.

This study highlights the value of empirically establishing how employee customer-oriented behaviors are affected by employee engagement as an integrative construct bringing together BP.

This study can help improve BP by increasing the frontline employees’ engagement and their customer-oriented behaviors. This study suggests that organizations using the findings of this study could effectively assess their frontline employees’ engagement and their customer-oriented behaviors and then plan for improving them.

This study offers a customer-oriented initiative as a social responsibility to be considered by retail banks. In light of the social exchange theory, the banks valuing customer-oriented can provide employees with knowledge, skills, values and support to develop motivation and abilities to demonstrate customer-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors.

Previous studies demonstrated that the employees’ engagement affects their customer-oriented behaviors. In addition, studies have referred to the effect of employees’ customer-oriented behaviors on BP. However, to the best of the knowledge, key questions regarding how the employees’ engagement at the branch level fosters customer-oriented behaviors and, in turn, the bank’s branches’ BP, remain unanswered. Hence, this study contributes to the investigation of the mediating role of the frontline employees’ customer-oriented behaviors in the relationship between their engagement and branches’ BP in the retail banking sector.

This study investigated the effects of social capital on frontline bank employee's adaptive selling behavior via the psychological process. Frontline bank employees' positive social relationships enhance their perception of the work environment and encourage work engagement. With the multiple mediation model, both internal and external social capital have direct and indirect influence on the frontline bank employee's adaptive selling behavior.

Data for this study were collected from a cross-sectional sample of retail banking industry in Korea. Specifically, using two-step procedures, employees of financial service or insurance sales department in banks were selected and online survey questionnaires were distributed to them. Data from 330 employees were collected and analyzed.

The results of this study showed how social capital affects frontline bank employees' person–job fit as a cognitive psychological process, leading to work engagement as an emotional psychological process and, in turn, more adaptive selling behavior. Using multiple mediation analysis, the results showed that work engagement on its own exerts a mediating effect on social capital, whereas a person–job fit does not.

This study applied both aspects of the social capital concept by dividing it into internal and external social capital, and exploring each separately. This study examined the influence on psychological processes and behavioral response by distinguishing between the two forms of social capital. Second, this study expands the previous studies by introducing social capital as an antecedent factor of frontline bank employees' adaptive selling behavior. Finally, this study explains how frontline bank employees' relational resources (i.e. social capital) influence their emotional aspect (i.e. work engagement) and cognitive aspect (i.e. person–job fit), which ultimately influence performance-driven behavior (i.e. adaptive selling behavior).

This research showed the importance of hiring frontline bank employees with excellent social capital capabilities. Furthermore, this study underscored the fact that organizations require preparing and providing practical management methods that can improve the social capital of their current frontline employees. Last, organization need to design the job in a way that innately improves frontline employees' social capital. Therefore, these jobs provide many opportunities for frontline bank employees to use their ability to build relationships in their interactions with customers and make practical decisions to achieve job performance.

This study improved our understanding regarding the importance of employees' social capital by revealing the psychological process of how frontline bank employees' social capital affects adaptive selling behavior. Second, this study expands on the literature by introducing internal and external social capital as an antecedent factor affecting the adaptive selling behavior of frontline bank employees. Furthermore, this study advances understanding on the manner in which relational resources of frontline bank employees (i.e. social capital) influence the emotional (i.e. work engagement) as well as the cognitive aspects (i.e. person–job fit), which ultimately influence performance-driven behavior (i.e. adaptive selling behavior).

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 investigates the role of personal resource (i.e. psychological empowerment) in reducing the negative impact of emotional exhaustion of frontline employees on their engagement. It also examines the moderating effects of ethical climate and transformational leadership in mitigating the negative influence of emotional exhaustion on engagement among frontline service employees (FLEs).

Data were collected from 671 frontline employees from financial services sector. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical regression analysis (HRA) were used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Results show that the impact of emotional exhaustion on employee engagement is greatly affected by psychological empowerment. Transformational leadership moderates the negative effects of emotional exhaustion on psychological empowerment, while ethical climate weakens the negative impact of emotional exhaustion on employee engagement.

Service firms need to provide enough autonomy to emotionally exhausted frontline employees so that they feel valued. The emotionally exhausted employees can be engaged if they are empowered to discharge their job most effectively and a climate is ensured which can keep them motivated toward accomplishing their targets. A fair and just treatment shall boost their morale to perform better and to strengthen their staying intentions.

The novelty of our study lies in examining and fostering engagement among emotionally exhausted FLEs. It shows that job resources at the individual level (i.e. psychological empowerment), team level (i.e. transformational leadership) and organizational level (i.e. ethical climate) can help in encouraging work engagement among emotionally exhausted FLEs.

The aim of this study is to examine factors related to employee engagement in frontline jobs in service firms.

A conceptual model was developed and tested on a survey in which 279 hospitality frontline employees participated.

The findings show that employee engagement is closely linked to employees' innovative behaviour. Accordingly, the study clearly reveals the value of having an engaged frontline workforce. Moreover, the results show that perceptions of role benefit, job autonomy, and strategic attention were all significantly related to greater employee engagement.

This study limits its examination to the antecedents and effects of employee engagement for two types of service organizations.

The study has demonstrated the importance for managers of having an engaged workforce. In particular, it is important for managers to notice that engagement is a major driver to innovative behaviour. Consequently, one general and key practical implication from this study is the importance for mangers to measure regularly the engagement of their workforce.

This paper enhances one's knowledge of factors linked to employee engagement.

This empirical study explored how coworker incivility and customer incivility affect the work engagement and job performance of frontline employees.

To investigate the incivility and characteristics of hospitality industry workplaces, this study recruited frontline employees from tourist hotels as study participants. Because complete contact information could not be obtained for this population, convenience sampling was employed. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection.

Coworker incivility and customer incivility reduced work engagement and job performance. The effects of coworker incivility on the work engagement and job performance are greater than those of customer incivility. Furthermore, work engagement has a positive effect on the job performance.

Although studies have investigated the effects of customer incivility, these effects have not been compared with those of coworker incivility. Moreover, studies on the influence of coworker and customer incivility on job performance and work engagement in the hospitality industry and on those of work engagement on job performance have been scant. The current empirical study investigated the effects of coworker and customer incivility on the job performance and work engagement and of frontline hospitality employees.

This paper aims to propose and test a research model that investigates work engagement as a mediator of the effects of perceptions of organizational politics on affective organizational commitment, extra‐role performance, and turnover intentions.

Data were gathered from a sample of 231 full‐time frontline employee‐supervisor dyads in Iran. The relationships in the model were tested using LISREL 8.30 through structural equation modeling.

The results show that the fully‐mediated model provides a better fit to the data than does the partially mediated model and further indicate that work engagement acts as a full mediator of the impacts of perceptions of organizational politics on affective organizational commitment, extra‐role performance, and turnover intentions.

In future studies testing the effects of challenge and hindrance demands simultaneously on work engagement would be useful. Replication studies with larger sample sizes in different hospitality settings in Iran as well as other developing countries in the Middle East are in order to cross‐validate the findings.

Providing training programs could make employees cope with difficulties associated with other hindrance demands and their potential effects on organizational politics. In training programs employees can be motivated to speak up when they observe the root causes of organizational politics and unfair decisions in the workplace. This is important, because having a transparent work environment establishes trust between managers and employees. In addition, top management of the hotels should devise new policies and procedures that would minimize the possibility of political decisions.

Empirical research regarding the relationships among perceptions of organizational politics, work engagement, and hotel employee outcomes in the hospitality management and marketing literature is sparse. This study partially fills in this void by investigating the mediating role of work engagement via data obtained in the Iranian hotel industry.

Drawing on and extending the socially embedded model of thriving, this paper aims to investigate how and when customer participation promotes hospitality frontline employees’ engagement in extra-role service behavior.

A two-wave questionnaire survey was carried out among frontline service employees and their immediate supervisors in a four-star business hotel in Eastern China. Path analysis using Mplus 8.3 examined a multilevel moderated mediation model.

Customer participation has a positive effect on frontline employees’ experience of thriving, which in turn promotes their engagement in extra-role service behavior. Nevertheless, supervisors’ negative affect weakens the positive effect of customer participation.

Hotels could implement employee assistance programs, arrange training on emotional regulation and positive psychology and create a fun work environment to help alleviate supervisors’ experience of negative affect so as to lessen its adverse effect on frontline employees’ perception of customer participation.

First, this work is one of the few studies exploring how customer participation affects frontline employees’ well-being (in terms of thriving) and extra-role service behavior, which advances extant value co-creation literature. Second, the moderating role of supervisors’ negative affect enriches the limited understanding of when customer participation might not bring firm benefits. Third, by uncovering customer participation as an antecedent of employee thriving, this study extends thriving research that only attends to contexts located within organizations.

Researchers and practitioners have remarked the critical nature of job crafting for employee and organizational effectiveness in the hotel industry. However, few studies have investigated the determinants of job crafting, especially the role of personality traits. Hence, this study aims to address this research gap by exploring how job resourcefulness influences job crafting and by clarifying the mediating role of work engagement.

The sample of the present study comprised 433 Taiwanese frontline hotel employees. The hypothesized relationships were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that job-resourceful employees tend to engage themselves at work. Engaged employees tend to craft their jobs individually and collaboratively. That is, work engagement is a mediator between job resourcefulness and job crafting. Finally, the job resourcefulness–work engagement–individual crafting relationship is closer than the job resourcefulness–work engagement–collaborative crafting relationship.

The findings suggest that job resourcefulness can be considered as a criterion in selecting and retaining employees. Work engagement may serve as a mechanism for interpreting the relationship between job resourcefulness and job crafting. This study provides crucial insights to help hotel managers seek and aid employees who can actively reshape their work conditions. However, the sample comprises only frontline hotel employees and the generalization can be considered in the future studies.

This research is the first to examine the psychological process that mediates the connection between job resourcefulness and job crafting. The findings of this study contribute to the theory of the relationship between personality traits and job crafting and may serve as a reference in related practices.

Frontline employees face constant emotional demands in the course of providing services to their customers, which can impact job engagement. This study aims to investigate the influence of emotional labor (surface and deep acting) and job resources (having a mentor and availability of expressive emotional network resources) on employees’ customer orientation and their relationship to three dimensions of job engagement: vigor, absorption and dedication.

Using data collected from food service providers, a conceptual model based on the job demands–resources theory is developed and tested.

Findings show that having a mentor and expressive emotional network resources increases customer orientation, which in turn increases vigor, absorption and dedication. However, surface acting negatively affects customer orientation, which indirectly reduces job engagement.

Consistent with the main tenet of the job-demands and resources theory, it was found that surface acting reduces engagement, whereas job resources (expressive emotional network resources and mentorship) boost engagement. Moreover, the results suggest that the commercialization of human feelings still remains an important topic for service providers to consider during service interactions because its presence affects frontline service employee engagement levels.