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This study aims to explore how not-for-profit organisations (NFPs) adopt service innovation and improve their employee resilience capabilities as a response to environmental changes arising from marketisation of public services.

Using a multiple case-study research design, this study involved 32 interviews with frontline employees working in a not-for-profit care-providing organisation.

This study finds that the development of absorptive capacity can facilitate service innovation adoption in NFPs and improve employee resilience in times of transition.

This study offers theoretical insights on service innovation, absorptive capacity and employee resilience in NFPs. It makes practical recommendations that will enable NFPs to help frontline employees better adopt service innovation practices in business models endorsed by the private sector.

Drawing on social information processing theory (SIP), this paper examines whether and how humble leadership affects employees' service improvisation (ESI) in the hospitality industry. Further, the study investigates the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating role of creative self-efficacy (CSE).

To test the proposed relationships, the study adopts a cross-sectional design, administering questionnaires to 456 frontline staff in Egypt’s hospitality industry across three main sectors: restaurants, hotels and travel agencies. SPSS 27 and AMOS 22 were used for statistical analysis.

The study reveals a positive relationship between humble leadership and ESI, partially mediated by psychological safety. Furthermore, CSE not only strengthens the relationship between psychological safety and ESI but also enhances the indirect effect of humble leadership on ESI via psychological safety.

The study offers valuable insights for practitioners in the hospitality industry. To boost ESI, organizations can incorporate humble leadership attributes into their leadership development programs. Fostering a psychologically safe workplace would facilitate the positive impact of humble leadership on ESI. Recognizing CSE as a pivotal moderator underscores the importance of strategically selecting and developing employees with high CSE. These insights aim to cultivate a more service-oriented and effective workforce in the hospitality industry.

This study significantly contributes to leadership research in the hospitality industry by uncovering a previously unexplored link between humble leadership and ESI. Exploring psychological safety as a mediator and CSE as a moderator enhances our comprehension of how and when humble leadership influences ESI.

This paper aims to explore the role of frontline employees (FLEs) as mediators in transformative service processes within services targeting vulnerable users.

This paper is based on a case study of the development and implementation of a dementia village, and the data consist of documents, in-depth interviews and field observations.

The analysis identifies FLEs as mediators in six different roles. These roles highlight how FLEs perform as mediators, acting in between and for vulnerable users and thus supporting their well-being. Specifically, the roles explicate the mediating role of FLEs in the design and planning of transformative changes and in daily work practices.

The different mediating roles of FLEs presented here should inform care providers and managers of how employees can become assets for supporting vulnerable users’ well-being during the design and planning stages of transformative change and through daily service work.

This paper offers novel insights into the multifaceted roles of FLEs in transformative services. The findings add to the current debate on mediation in transformative services and contribute to the literature by extending and refining the established conceptual and empirical understandings of the role of transformative service mediators in consumers’ well-being.

Drawing on signaling theory and the “signal transmission–interpretation–feedback” framework, this study explores the effects of perceived distributive justice and respect from managers on nurses' work meaningfulness and work effort in public hospitals in China and examines the moderating role of work self-efficacy.

We collected 341 paired questionnaires for nurses and managers from four public hospitals in China. The data were analyzed by structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis.

Distributive justice and managers' respect for employees are positively related to work meaningfulness. Additionally, work self-efficacy negatively moderates this relationship. Work meaningfulness is positively related to work effort and fully mediates the relationships between perceived distributive justice and respect from the manager and work effort.

This study provides useful insights for healthcare organizations to improve nurses' work meaningfulness from the perspectives of their material and emotional needs, according to their work self-efficacy characteristics, thus promoting their work effort. The findings offer important guidance for improving the effectiveness of grass-roots human resources to cope with unpredictable situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study focuses on the organization's environmental factors that affect the primary staff's work meaningfulness. Further, it analyzes the differences in signal interpretation among nurses with different work self-efficacy characteristics, thus providing new insights into work meaningfulness. Through manager–nurse pairing data, it reveals the important role of work meaningfulness in motivating work effort.

This study aims to develop and test an integrative model that examines the effects of customization and perceived employee authenticity on customer delight, which in turn influences customers’ willingness to recommend (WTR) and willingness to pay a premium (WTPP) as outcomes in a hotel context. The moderating role of online review valence in this process is also examined.

This study adopts a 2 (customization: low vs high) × 2 (perceived employee authenticity: low vs high) × 2 (online review valence: negative vs positive) experimental design. A total of 409 US consumers were recruited and randomly assigned to a hotel check-in scenario. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Findings confirmed the role of customer delight in mediating customization and employee authenticity on WTR and WTPP. In addition, perceived employee authenticity was a stronger driver of customer delight for consumers exposed to negative online reviews than for those exposed to positive reviews.

The findings provide useful guidance in designing efficient service strategies for generating a delightful customer experience. Hotel practitioners should provide customized services and manage employees in a way that helps them deliver authentic services that achieve customer delight. Understanding that customer expectations formed through online reviews play a significant role in service evaluations, hotel managers make an extra effort to monitor online reviews and manage customer expectations.

Although existing research suggests that customer delight plays an important role in positive consumer outcomes, there is still potential space to explore the theoretical mediational mechanisms underlying this effect and the moderating effect on this relationship between customer delight and consumer responses. This study contributes by testing the moderating impact of online review valence and the mediating impact of customer delight.

This study aims to explore the role of frontline service employees’ (FSEs) awareness that their job can be substituted by smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms (STARA) in their job autonomy and proactive service performance and when these relationships can be buffered. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress, the study examined the mediating relationship between FSEs’ STARA awareness, job autonomy and proactive service performance and the moderating effects of self-efficacy and resilience on this relationship.

The authors administered two-wave online surveys to 301 South Korean FSEs working in various service sectors (e.g. retailing, food/beverage, hospitality/tourism and banking). The Time 1 survey measured respondents’ STARA awareness, self-efficacy, resilience and job autonomy, and the Time 2 survey assessed their proactive service performance.

FSEs’ STARA awareness negatively affected their subsequent proactive service performance through decreased job autonomy. The negative association between STARA awareness and job autonomy was weaker when FSEs’ self-efficacy was high than when it was low. While the authors observed no significant moderation of resilience, the author found a marginally significant three-way interaction between STARA awareness, self-efficacy and resilience. Specifically, STARA awareness was negatively related to job autonomy only when both self-efficacy and resilience were low. When either self-efficacy or resilience was high, the association between STARA awareness and job autonomy became nonsignificant, suggesting the buffering roles of the two personal resources.

Given that the measurement of variables relied on self-reported data, rater biases might have affected the findings of the study. Moreover, the simultaneous measurement of STARA awareness, self-efficacy, resilience and job autonomy could preclude causal inferences between these variables. The authors encourage future studies to use a more rigorous methodology to reduce rater biases and establish stronger causality between the variables.

Service firms can decrease FSEs’ STARA awareness through training in the knowledge and skills necessary to work with these technologies. To promote FSEs’ proactive service performance in this context, service firms need to involve them in decisions related to STARA adoption and allow them to craft their jobs. Service managers should provide FSEs with social support and exercise empowering and supportive leadership to help them view STARA as a challenge rather than a threat.

Distinct from prior research on STARA awareness and employee outcomes, the study identified proactive service performance as a key outcome in the STARA context. By presenting self-efficacy and resilience as crucial personal resources that buffer FSEs from the deleterious impact of STARA awareness, the study provides practitioners with insights that can help FSEs maintain their job autonomy and proactive service performance in times of digitalization and automation.

The study aims to examine whether job resourcefulness affects task performance through job crafting at the within-person level.

The data were collected from employees of the tour and travel firms and their supervisors. Multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) was used for analysis due to the repeated data structure, for example, days (n = 900) nested in individuals (n = 180).

Results show a positive association between job resourcefulness and task performance, with the full mediation of job crafting at the within-person level.

The study concludes that variation in job resourcefulness impacts job crafting and task performance at the within-person level.

In the era of the service economy, the personalized needs of customers are increasing rapidly. It often occurs that front-line employees bend organizational rules to help customers. The study sought to explore the influence mechanism of servant leadership on specific dimensions of customer-oriented deviance from the manager’s perspective, examine the mediating role of psychological security, and the moderating role of error management climate in the process.

We conducted an online survey study in China from April 10 to 29, 2023. We use online survey questionnaire technique and random sampling method for data collection. The authors collected 385 questionnaires from China and tested the model by SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0.

The results show that servant leadership significantly promotes employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors, psychological security plays a mediating role between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors, and error management climate has a positive moderating effect between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

This study explores the influence mechanism of servant leadership on deviant customer-oriented behaviors. The results of this study not only enrich the theoretical research on the formation mechanism of deviant customer-oriented behaviors but also provide a reference for leaders to correctly view and effectively manage employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

This study aims to use emotions-as-social information theory to investigate how physical (customer perceived store atmosphere) and social servicescapes (customer information searching) influence the effects of employees’ positive affective displays on customer outcomes via customer positive moods and positive expectation disconfirmation.

This research included two studies, each using a distinct research design, to empirically test the proposed model. Study 1 involved 200 observational data points on objective purchase amounts from designer watch shops. In Study 2, data were collected from 230 customers in designer jewelry stores.

The results of path analyses revealed that: employee positive affective displays are positively associated with customer purchase outcomes; employee positive affective displays had positive indirect effects on customer purchase outcomes by enhancing customer positive moods and positive expectation disconfirmation; these positive indirect effects were strengthened when customers engaged in information search behaviors; and these positive indirect effects were attenuated when customers perceive store atmosphere as favorable, indicating a substitution effect of customer perceived store atmosphere.

Previous research has not thoroughly examined the role of the servicescape in moderating the effects of employees’ positive affective displays on customer purchase outcomes. This present study not only clarified the affective and cognitive mechanisms that link employees’ positive affective displays on purchase outcomes but also identified servicescape as a critical boundary condition of these effects.

This study offers an empirical framework for how hotel employees CSR perceptions affect their job satisfaction by incorporating the parallel mediating roles of organizational identification and psychological contract fulfillment. In addition, it examines the moderator effects of employees' CSR-induced attributions on the constructed mediated model, providing a powerful lens through which to evaluate when and how employees' CSR perceptions influence organizational identification and psychological contract fulfillment.

The study use PLS-SEM techniques to analyze a sample of 520 employees from 49 luxury hotels with 4–5 stars in Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam.

The results show that CSR positively influences job satisfaction through the mediating role of psychological contract fulfillment and organizational identification. Besides, attachment styles also play moderator role in the relationship between CSR and psychological contract fulfillment/organizational identification.

The discoveries elucidated within this research endeavor proffer actionable discernments to be earnestly contemplated by professionals entrenched in the hotel industry, earnestly aspiring to ameliorate the contentment of their workforce and, concomitantly, augment the overarching efficacy of their organizational operations.

This study provides human resource departments with insights and suggestions for maximizing the efficacy of CSR implementation in the hotel industry.