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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 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.

Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to identify the mediating effects of depersonalization and resilience on the relationship between customer incivility and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). It further posits that these indirect effects vary depending on the caring climate and achievement orientation.

A field survey among 622 service employees (Study 1) and a three-wave field survey of 315 service employees and their managers (Study 2) from various service organizations were conducted.

This study confirms that depersonalization operates as a negative mediator in the relationship between customer incivility and OCB. Simultaneously, resilience emerges as a positive mediator, underscoring the contrasting pathways through which customer incivility affects OCB. Furthermore, a caring climate plays a pivotal role in mitigating the detrimental impact of depersonalization on OCB and weakening the positive impact of resilience on OCB. Additionally, this study identifies achievement orientation as a significant moderator between customer incivility and resilience.

This study advances theoretical foundations by investigating depersonalization and resilience as critical mediators in the intricate relationship between customer incivility and OCB. It goes beyond the conventional understanding of customer incivility’s impact by shedding light on the dual roles of a caring climate, demonstrating its potential to alleviate both positive and negative consequences of customer incivility. Moreover, its identification of achievement orientation as a moderator adds a novel dimension to the discourse, emphasizing the need for tailored strategies to harness employee resilience in the face of customer incivility.

People develop general stereotypes and beliefs about how people look and behave, and discrepancies in perceptions of warmth and competence can lead to incongruence in expected behaviors during service interactions. These perceptions can contribute to negative outcomes for employees; therefore, this study aims to examine how perceptions of warmth affect both customer reactions to employees who are Asian and the work stress, strain and attitudes of employees who are Asian toward their jobs.

To investigate the phenomenon, the authors conducted three studies. The first study examined whether occupational-racial stereotypes influence customers’ evaluation of employees’ service recovery performance. The second study temporally examined whether employees who are Asian engage in more emotional labor strategies to counter these occupational-racial stereotypes and as a result experience more negative outcomes. And a third study investigated the cumulative effects of negative perceptions on employee outcomes.

The results suggest employees in the hospitality industry who are Asian are perceived as less warm during service failure interactions and, thus, must work harder to regulate their emotions. As a result, employees who are Asian reported experiencing more negative outcomes, supporting the notion that occupational-racial stereotypes contribute to racial disparity and act as challenges and barriers for employees in the service industry.

These findings emphasize the need to understand and address occupational-racial stereotypes for employees who are Asian to mitigate racial disparities in the service industry. Organizations can promote diverse work climates, provide emotional support and foster high-quality relationships to support employee well-being and satisfaction.

The results provide insight into how stereotypical warmth perceptions of employees who are Asian may affect the demands they face when engaging in service recovery, and how these increased demands may reduce the quality of their work experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model in which coworker service sabotage influences hospitality employees’ service creativity via work engagement. It also aims to test the moderating effect of sensitivity to the interpersonal mistreatment of others (SIMO).

A time-lagged questionnaire study was performed in hotels in China. The hypotheses were tested via hierarchical multiple regression.

Coworker service sabotage is indirectly associated with hospitality employees’ service creativity via work engagement. The trait of SIMO buffers the harmful effect of coworker service sabotage.

Although our research design helps mitigate common method bias, it could still exist. Other coworker behaviors that might influence employees were not included in this research. The findings may also be biased due to the restricted sample from China.

Hospitality organizations should take measures to curb service sabotage. Organizations could also provide supportive resources to suppress the negative impacts of coworker service sabotage. Moreover, organizations should motivate those low in SIMO to care more about customers.

The research takes the lead in investigating the outcomes of service sabotage from a third-party perspective. Work engagement is identified as the mechanism for transmitting the impact of coworker service sabotage to employees. Moreover, a new moderator that attenuates the negative effects of coworker service sabotage is found.

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.

Internal knowledge transfer is crucial for firms to improve their employees’ abilities and improve their work performance. However, there is still a gap in the knowledge management field regarding whether internal knowledge transfer can leverage employee personality traits and service performance in service-oriented organizations. To address this gap, this study aims to validate a multilevel model of the mediating (i.e. internal knowledge transfer as a mediator) and moderating (i.e. task interdependence as a moderator) mechanisms underlying personality traits and employee service performance.

Multilevel structural equation modeling was applied for model validation using an original data set from 45 team leaders and 333 employees working in Chinese hotels.

Internal knowledge transfer mediated the link between extraversion and employee service performance and the link between openness to experience and employee service performance. Task interdependence played a moderating role that strengthened both the impacts of extraversion and openness to experience on internal knowledge transfer.

Through the use of an original data set, this study advances the knowledge management discipline by investigating the mediating impact of internal knowledge transfer between personality traits and employee service performance and revealing the moderating impact of task interdependence that underlies the links between personality traits and internal knowledge transfer.

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 explore the associations linking employees’ challenge-hindrance appraisals toward artificial intelligence (AI) to service performance while considering the dual mediating roles of job crafting and job insecurity, as well as the moderating role of AI knowledge.

A survey was administered to a sample of 297 service industry employees. This study examined all the hypotheses with Mplus 8.0.

This study confirms that challenge appraisal toward AI has an indirect positive influence on service performance via job crafting (motivation process), whereas hindrance appraisal toward AI has an indirect negative influence on service performance via job insecurity (strain process). Meanwhile, AI knowledge, serving as a key personal resource, could strengthen the positive impacts of challenge appraisal toward AI on job crafting and of hindrance appraisal toward AI on job insecurity.

Organizational decision-makers should first survey employees’ appraisals toward AI and then adopt targeted managerial strategies. From the perspective of service industry employees, employees should adopt proactive coping strategies and enrich their knowledge of AI to meet the challenges brought by this technology.

The primary contribution of this study is that we enrich the literature on AI by exploring the dual mediators (i.e. job crafting and job insecurity) through which AI awareness affects service performance. Moreover, this study advances our understanding of when appraisals toward AI influence job outcomes by identifying the moderating role of AI knowledge.

This study clarifies how intra-organizational social capital (IOSC) and unit-organizational ambidexterity (UOA), using resource-based view and dynamic capability theory, together support organizational value creation. While there is research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) exploring the role of resources and its uses, there remains limited understanding of how resources are linked and their effective utilization in the service sector. This study aims to examine the mediating process linking employee-experienced service-oriented high-performance work systems (SHPWS) experienced by employees and service performance by integrating IOSC and UOA.

This study uses time lagged data from managers and employees of different branches of Chinese state-owned banks. To test the proposed hypotheses, path analysis was applied.

The path analysis results reveal that employee-experienced SHPWS is an important antecedent of service performance. Moreover, IOSC (as resources) and UOA (uses) strongly mediate the theorized relationship.

This study attempts to refine theory and practice with clearer, more insightful and coherent means to better understand and help unpack the ‘black box’ between SHPWS-performance relationships through a new linkage model.