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Based on the resource conservation theory, this research paper aims to evaluate the positive impact of customer orientation on frontline employees' emotional exhaustion and the moderating effects of customer incivility and supervisor monitoring.

Two-wave data from 484 frontline employees in power supply business halls were analyzed. This study used AMOS 23.0, SPSS22.0 and PROCESS macro for data statistics and analysis.

Our empirical research demonstrates that customer orientation has a significant positive impact on frontline employees' emotional exhaustion. At the same time, supervisor monitoring moderates the relationship between customer orientation and emotional exhaustion. The higher the interactional or observational monitoring, the stronger customer orientation's effect on frontline employees' emotional exhaustion. Moreover, a three-way interaction model exists between customer orientation, customer incivility and supervisor monitoring.

This study yields practical implications for helping the frontline employees of service-oriented organizations alleviate multiple interpersonal workplace pressures.

Based on resource conservation theory, this paper used a novel approach to focus on customer orientation, customer incivility and supervisor monitoring as interpersonal stressors.

The impact of frontline robots (FLRs) on customer orientation perceptions remains unclear. This is remarkable because customers may associate FLRs with standardization and cost-cutting, such that they may not fit firms that aim to be customer oriented.

In four experiments, data are collected from customers interacting with frontline employees (FLEs) and FLRs in different settings.

FLEs are perceived as more customer-oriented than FLRs due to higher competence and warmth evaluations. A relational interaction style attenuates the difference in perceived competence between FLRs and FLEs. These agents are also perceived as more similar in competence and warmth when FLRs participate in the customer journey's information and negotiation stages. Switching from FLE to FLR in the journey harms FLR evaluations.

The authors recommend firms to place FLRs only in the negotiation stage or in both the information and negotiation stages of the customer journey. Still then customers should not transition from employees to robots (vice versa does no harm). Firms should ensure that FLRs utilize a relational style when interacting with customers for optimal effects.

The authors bridge the FLR and sales/marketing literature by drawing on social cognition theory. The authors also identify the product categories for which customers are willing to negotiate with an FLR. Broadly speaking, this study’s findings underline that customers perceive robots as having agency (i.e. the mental capacity for acting with intentionality) and, just as humans, can be customer-oriented.

This study aims to test the relationship between emotional labor and service quality of the frontline employees of Chinese restaurants during the coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). This study further investigated the mediating role of work fatigue (WF) and the moderating role of supervisor–subordinate Guanxi (SSG).

The authors used a time-lag approach to gather data from a sample of 365 frontline staff members working in Chinese restaurants. All hypotheses were tested using SPSS and AMOS.

First, restaurant frontline employees’ deep acting was associated with higher service quality, whereas surface acting leads to lower service quality. Second, WF mediated the relationship between emotional labor and service quality. Third, SSG moderated the impact of emotional labor on WF during COVID-19.

All variables measured in this study were self-reported by restaurant frontline employees, which may increase the risk of common-method bias. However, this study enriches the literature on emotional labor, WF and SSG during COVID-19.

COVID-19 has severely affected the hotel, restaurant and catering sector and especially the psychological state and the work performance of frontline employees. Restaurant managers should implement some measures to improve employees’ service quality during COVID-19.

The present findings show that restaurant frontline employees adopted various emotional labor strategies when they were faced with higher than usual job demands and the risk of infection during COVID-19.

By investigating trust in the organization as a mediator and traditionality as a moderator, this study aims to examine the effect perceived organizational exploitation poses on frontline hotel employees’ service performance.

A three-wave survey that targets 219 supervisor–subordinate dyads from four Chinese hotels was conducted to test the hypotheses. The authors used SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 21.0 to analyze the data and verify the theoretical model.

This study found that perceived organizational exploitation exerts a destructive impact on frontline hotel employees’ service performance. Trust in the organization is a full mediator of the link connecting perceived organizational exploitation to service performance. Furthermore, traditionality weakens perceived organizational exploitation’s impact on trust in the organization and subsequent service performance.

The authors’ findings remind hotels to cease exploiting their employees to avoid compromising service performance. Hotels should also endeavor to instill trust among employees toward the hotel and allocate more attention to employees with lower levels of traditionality.

First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to explore the impact of perceived organizational exploitation on frontline hotel employees’ service performance. Second, this study reveals a novel mechanism underlying the connection between perceived organizational exploitation and service performance. Finally, this study identifies frontline hotel employees’ traditionality as a vital moderator that mitigates the negative relationships among perceived organizational exploitation, trust in the organization and service performance.

This study aims to develop a measurement scale for employee aesthetic labor (AL) in hospitality from the perspectives of frontline employees of international tourist hotels and airlines.

The authors utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods to develop the AL scale. Participants were frontline employees of international tourist hotels and airlines in Taiwan. The authors’ analysis incorporated both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to examine the results.

A four-factor, 21-item hospitality AL scale with satisfactory validity and reliability was created. The four AL factors are appropriate voice and response, pleasant appearance, corporate aesthetic image delivery and polite and elegant demeanor.

The developed AL scale can serve as a useful tool for the hospitality industry in terms of employee recruitment and training to align with the corporation's aesthetic image and reduce the potential burden of AL on employees.

Based on dramaturgical theory, this study focuses on the AL practices that are performed during service encounters with customers. It is potentially the first AL scale to be constructed using rigorous scale development procedures.

This study aims to identify the street-level approaches of professional workers in complex public social service organisations when attending to social assistance claimants.

The study employed a multifaceted approach comprising documentary analysis, semi-structured individual interviews (17) and focus group discussions (8) with qualified frontline social workers from primary care social services in Tarragona.

Social workers embodied three specific sets of cognitive, normative and emotional dispositions when attending to people with low incomes. First, the compassionate approach conceives clients as defensive regarding social services and emotionally vulnerable because of deprivation. Second, the instructional approach frames clients as being baffled by a new, precarious, institutional and economic context. They also lack information, abilities and the proper mindset to conceive of and attain available welfare and occupational resources. Third, the enforcement approach tends to define clients as suspicious, trying to obtain an excessive and unfair advantage of the welfare system that would eventually hamper their social opportunities.

Research thus far has tended to define public social assistance programmes in Southern welfare state contexts as mostly inefficient and hardly relevant residual social policies. The street-level approach shows that social workers try to resist the mere administrative processing of benefits, which is a professionally troubling and organisationally unsustainable way to proceed. They attempt to help clients by providing inclusive content in order to implement their benefits.

The present study aims to explore the linkages among transformational leadership, workplace spirituality and frontline employee (FLE) service recovery performance in the aviation service industry. The resilience of individuals was taken as a mediator for the associations between transformational leadership as well as workplace spirituality and frontline employee's service recovery performance. The hypothesized research model was examined by integrating the principles of COR theory and the SDT perspective on psychological needs.

The research model was evaluated via partial least squares (PLS). In particular, SmartPLS 3.0 software was utilized to examine anticipated correlations through a poll of 371 air service provider frontline employees.

Results demonstrated that transformational leadership had a positive impact on both service recovery performance and spirituality in the workplace. The positive connection between workplace spirituality and service recovery performance was also supported. Further, the mediating role of an employee's resilience in these relationships was established. The paper provides a significant contribution with both theoretical and practical implications.

The present research also provides some practical implications for the aviation industry. Since the aviation industry is a high-contact service industry, aviation frontline employees play a crucial role in service recovery strategies. Thus, air service providers need to provide these employees with ample resources to effectively handle service failures. Moreover, the service recovery performance of air service providers may benefit from the hiring of managers with strong transformational leadership styles. Therefore, these providers should take leadership style into account when recruiting, promoting and training supervisors. Managers should, among other activities, implement transformational leadership approaches, such as inspiring and motivating, establishing a supportive organizational climate, paying attention to employees' needs and engaging in active listening.

The current study contributes to the stream of research on SRP and the role of transformational leadership, workplace spirituality and resilience in service recovery in particular. Furthermore, by integrating the COR and SDT theories, the current study gives more real-world proof of the importance of leadership for organizations.

This study aims to develop a comprehensive, theoretically grounded framework of customer-to-customer interaction (CCI) management, by revisiting three older services marketing models: the servuction model, the services marketing triangle and the services marketing pyramid.

Noting the lack of theoretical frameworks of CCI management, this study adopts a problematization approach to identify foundational services marketing models, question their underlying assumptions, develop an alternative conceptual framework and evaluate its adequacy for CCI management, on the basis of a systematic literature review and content analyses.

By revisiting the assumptions underlying three relevant models in the light of the present-day, technology-infused service environment, this study proposes a four-triangle CCI management framework encompassing four specific modes of CCI management: managerial decisions by the firm; frontline employees; the design of the physical environment; and technology. Furthermore, this study emphasizes the triadic relationships involving the focal customer, other customers and the four modes of CCI management. Building on these findings, this study concludes with an extensive research agenda.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first scholarly effort in services marketing literature to provide a comprehensive, theoretically grounded framework of CCI management. With its basis in foundational models, the new framework is well-suited to address future challenges to service marketplaces too.

Elucidating self-determination and psychological empowerment theories, the current study aims to examine the link between psychological empowerment and proactive behavior. Additionally, it delves into the mediating role of prosocial motivation and assesses the moderating effects of horizontal collectivism between psychological empowerment and proactive behavior, examining the moderated-mediation effects of horizontal collectivism.

A structured questionnaire was distributed in three waves (T1, T2 and T3) among frontline service hotel workers, out of which only 507 were retained and found useful for analysis. The study employed PROCESS macro models 4 and 8 for the analyses.

The results indicated that psychological empowerment is connected to proactive behavior through the partial mediation of prosocial motivation. Further, when horizontal collectivism is high, the favorable association between psychological empowerment and proactive behavior via prosocial motivation is stronger.

Proactive service workers have an innate tendency to contribute optimally to their organization. Yet, research is insufficient about the factors that lead to proactive behavior among frontline service hotel workers. To date, there are hardly any empirical studies that have examined the buffering effects of horizontal collectivism between psychological empowerment and proactive behavior, which contributes to the originality and novelty of our research. In addition, this study offers practical implications related to ways to improve psychological empowerment among frontline service hotel workers in the ever-increasing era of automation.

This article overviews some key contributions to service research from the organizational behavior/human resource management (OB/HRM) discipline with its strong focus on the role of employees. This focus complements the Marketing discipline’s heavy emphasis on customers, largely true of service research, overall.

Ten OB/HRM frameworks/perspectives are applied to analyzing the roles of people (with a focus on employees and modest consideration of customers as “partial” employees who co-create value) in a service organization context. Also, commentary is offered on how the frameworks relate to six key themes in contemporary service research and/or practice. The article concludes with five reflections on the role and status of employees in service research—past, present and future.

Employee roles in evolving service contexts; participation role readiness of both employees and customers; role stress in participating customers; an employee “empowered state of mind”; an emphasis on internal service quality; “strong” HRM systems link individual HRM practices to firm performance; service-profit chain with links to well-being of employees and customers; a sociotechnical system theory lens on organizational frontlines (OF); service climate as an exemplar of interdisciplinary research; emotional labor in both employees and customers; the Human Experience (HX); specification of employee experience (EX).

Service remains very much about people who still guide organizational design, develop service strategy, place new service technologies and even still serve customers. Also, a people and organization-based competitive advantage is tough to copy, thus possessing sustainability, unlike with imitable technology.