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The authors systematically review empirical dyadic service encounter research published in top-tier journals between 1972 and 2022.

The authors employed bibliometric techniques, co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis to map schools of thought and research frontiers within the dyadic service encounter literature. In total, the authors analyzed 155 articles. To ensure inclusion of high-quality research, the authors screened articles from 139 journals with “4” or “4*” ratings on the 2021 Chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) journal list, in addition to articles published in three service sector-specific journals: Journal of Service Management, Journal of Services Marketing and Journal of Service Theory and Practice.

The authors' co-citation analysis identified four distinct clusters within the dyadic service encounter literature: (1) shaping and explaining service encounters; (2) emotions in service work; (3) modeling, manipulating and measuring encounter service quality and (4) emotional labor and regulation in dyadic service encounters. Furthermore, the authors' bibliographic coupling analysis generated three research clusters: (1) service encounter characteristics; (2) emotions and emotional labor and (3) service encounter interaction content.

The authors' comprehensive review synthesizes knowledge, summarizing similarities among research clusters within the service encounter realm. Noteworthy are research clusters that clarify the emotion-based underpinnings and reciprocal nature of behaviors and emotions within dyadic encounters. By conducting complementary bibliometric analyses, the authors trace the evolution of the service encounter literature, providing an overview of the present state of dyadic service encounter research. These analyses offer valuable insights into the current landscape of the field, identifying future dyadic service encounter research opportunities.

In this study, the authors develop a path model and investigate the effect of pandemic-oriented customer mistreatment on service sabotage through the lens of self-presentation theory. Moreover, the authors question the role of service climate as a moderator of the relationship between service sabotage and service performance.

Data were collected via a survey of 165 F&B frontline employees in restaurants in Iran. The hypotheses are examined using confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and ordinary least squares regression.

The findings reveal that POCM has a substantial and positive effect on service sabotage, and service climate mitigates the effect of service sabotage on service performance.

The study introduces and conceptually defines the term POCM. Furthermore, the authors apply the self-presentation theory as the overarching theory to explain underlying conditions in customer mistreatment and service sabotage. Moreover, although prior literature has described the saboteur–customer relationship as a one-line interaction, this study contributes to employee sabotage as a multi-linear transaction.

In this study, the authors identify new perspectives on the dark side of hospitality services in crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argue that pandemic-induced changes are essential not simply because they change customers’ moods and lower their patience threshold, but they further provoke ostentatious behaviors in saboteur–customer relations. These findings shed new light on the literature and provide managerial implications for enhancing hospitality performance.

This paper aims to examine how team-level empowering leadership related to service performance through thriving at work and how shared organizational social exchange and customer orientation moderated the latter relationships.

The authors collected the data from 283 flight attendants and their supervisors working at a major Korean airline. Multi-level analyses were used to test the effect of empowering leadership on employee outcomes.

Both team-level empowering leadership and customer orientation were significantly and indirectly associated with service performance via thriving at work. Additionally, customer orientation significantly moderated the relationship between team-level empowering leadership and thriving at work such that the relationship was stronger when customer orientation was low rather than high. In addition, shared organizational social exchange augmented the influence of team-level empowering leadership on service performance but not on thriving at work.

The findings suggest that team-level empowering leadership is more effective in enhancing thriving at work of employees when their customer orientation is low rather than high. In addition, a shared high-quality organizational social exchange augments the effect of empowering leadership on employees’ service performance.

This paper provides initial evidence of the interaction of team-level empowering leadership and individual¬-level customer orientation on thriving at work and service performance. Additionally, it documents the differential augmenting effect of shared organizational social exchange on the relationship between empowering leadership and these outcomes. Collectively, the findings explain why and when team-level empowering leadership relates to service performance.

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.

Service robots are taking over the organizational frontline. Despite a recent surge in studies on this topic, extant works are predominantly conceptual in nature. The purpose of this paper is to provide valuable empirical insights by building on the attribution theory.

Two vignette-based experimental studies were employed. Data were collected from US respondents who were randomly assigned to scenarios focusing on a hotel’s reception service and restaurant’s waiter service.

Results indicate that respondents make stronger attributions of responsibility for the service performance toward humans than toward robots, especially when a service failure occurs. Customers thus attribute responsibility to the firm rather than the frontline robot. Interestingly, the perceived stability of the performance is greater when the service is conducted by a robot than by an employee. This implies that customers expect employees to shape up after a poor service encounter but expect little improvement in robots’ performance over time.

Robots are perceived to be more representative of a firm than employees. To avoid harmful customer attributions, service providers should clearly communicate to customers that frontline robots pack sophisticated analytical, rather than simple mechanical, artificial intelligence technology that explicitly learns from service failures.

Customer responses to frontline robots have remained largely unexplored. This paper is the first to explore the attributions that customers make when they experience robots in the frontline.

While research evidences how customers’ emotions can influence their consumer experience, understanding of how employees’ displayed emotions affect the customer service experience is more limited. Drawing on affect transfer theory, the authors test for the mediating role of attitude towards the employee, which is proposed to mediate the effect of employees’ displayed emotion on customers’ satisfaction with recovery. As service recovery entails a critical service experience in which emotions can easily rise, this paper aims to highlight the pivotal role of employee-displayed emotions during service recovery.

A scenario-based experiment in the context of an airline service failure recovery (3 × 2 between-subjects design) manipulates frontline employees’ emotions (anger vs happiness vs no specific emotion) and the quality of the solution (bad vs good).

Employees’ displayed emotions directly affect attitude towards the employee and indirectly affect service recovery satisfaction. Moreover, attitude towards the employee is affected more by the employee’s displayed emotion when the solution offered is bad compared to good.

Employees’ emotions displayed during service recovery can enhance or damage service recovery strategies. Employees should control for negative emotions in the case of service failure, especially when unable to provide a good solution.

Emotions displayed by employees can influence the customer’s service recovery evaluations. There is an interesting interaction between the quality of the solution and employees’ displayed emotions. Additionally, the mantra of “service with a smile” may not be valid in the case of service recovery: rather, employees should avoid displaying negative emotions.

A pesar de que la literatura ha demostrado la importancia que tienen las emociones en los consumidores, se sabe poco acerca de cómo influyen las emociones de los empleados. Basándonos en la teoría de la transferencia de afecto, testamos el papel mediador de la actitud hacia el empleado. Ésta se propone como mediadora del efecto que tiene la emoción mostrada por el empleado en la satisfacción del cliente. Este trabajo resalta el papel fundamental de las emociones mostradas por el empleado durante la recuperación del servicio.

Experimento (3x2 entre sujetos) basado en el fallo de una aerolínea. Se manipulan las emociones del empleado (enfado vs alegría vs ninguna emoción específica) y la calidad de la solución (mala vs buena).

Las emociones mostradas por los empleados afectan directamente a la actitud hacia el empleado e indirectamente a la satisfacción con la recuperación del servicio. La actitud se ve más afectada por la emoción mostrada por el empleado cuando la solución ofrecida es mala.

Las emociones mostradas por los empleados pueden contribuir o dañar las estrategias de recuperación del servicio. Los empleados deben controlar las emociones negativas, especialmente cuando no pueden ofrecer una buena solución.

Las emociones mostradas por los empleados influyen en la recuperación del servicio. Existe interacción entre la calidad de la solución y la emoción del empleado. Además, la consigna de “atender al cliente con una sonrisa” puede no ser válida en este contexto, siendo más relevante que los empleados no muestren emociones negativas.

虽然研究证明了顾客的情绪如何影响他们的消费体验, 但对员工所表现出的情绪如何影响顾客服务体验的理解却比较有限。借鉴情感转移理论, 我们测试了对员工态度的中介作用, 提出了员工表现出的情绪对客户对服务补救满意度影响的中介作用。由于服务补救涉及情绪容易上升的关键服务体验, 本文强调了员工表现出的情绪在服务补救过程中的关键作用。

在航空公司服务故障补救的背景下, 一个基于场景的实验（3x2主体间设计）操纵了一线员工的情绪（愤怒vs快乐vs无特定情绪）和解决方案的质量（差vs好）。

员工表现出来的情绪直接影响顾客对员工的态度, 间接影响对服务补救的满意度。此外, 当所提供的解决方案质量是差的, 而不是好的, 顾客对员工的态度受员工所表现的情绪的影响更大。

员工在服务补救过程中表现出来的情绪可以增强或破坏服务补救策略。在服务失败的情况下, 员工应该控制消极的情绪, 特别是在无法提供一个好的解决方案时。

员工表现出来的情绪会影响顾客的服务补救的评价。解决方案的质量和员工表现的情绪之间存在着有趣的互动。此外, “微笑服务 “的口号在服务补救的情况下可能是无效的：相反, 员工应该避免表现出负面情绪。

This study aims to investigate whether and how strongly cultural (mis)matches influence immigrant customers’ satisfaction, as well as if this relationship is mediated by cultural or service employee performance attributions. In addition, the authors test whether attributions differ depending on the service delivery outcome (success vs failure).

The 2 (origin of service employee: Austria or Turkey) × 2 (service delivery outcome: success or failure) scenario-based experiment includes 120 Turkish immigrant customers in Austria.

Contrary to previous research, the results indicate that in an immigrant customer context, cultural (mis)match does not influence customer satisfaction. The service delivery outcome is a boundary condition. With a positive service delivery outcome, immigrant customers attribute the results to the cultural background of the employee if it is the same as their own, but they attribute success to employees’ performance if they belong to the immigration destination culture. For negative service delivery outcomes, neither cultural nor performance attributions arise.

This study is the first to focus specifically on immigrant customer behavior in a high-involvement service context. The results challenge the predictions of social identity theory and the similarity-attraction paradigm and highlight that the immigrant context is unique. In this context, attributions play a key role in determining customer satisfaction.

With the rapid development of the service industry, service innovation has gradually become a hot topic in business today. How to further improve employees' service innovative behaviors has become critical to organizations' survival and success. Servant leadership, as a leadership style characterized by serving others, is closely related to employees' service innovative behaviors. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical framework to examine the influence of servant leadership on employees' service innovative behavior, the mediating role of intrinsic motivation and the moderating role of identification with the leader.

To test the theoretical model, a multi-time survey method was used to collect data from 381employees from a large high-tech company in Mainland China.

The results confirm that servant leadership can promote employees' service innovative behavior and intrinsic motivation. Meanwhile, employees' intrinsic motivation partly mediates the influence of servant leadership on their service innovative behavior. Moreover, this mediating relationship is conditional on the moderating role of individual identification with the leader in the path from servant leadership to individual intrinsic motivation.

The key limitation of this study lies in the representativeness of sample data, which is the convenience of non-probability sampling and self-reported data only from a large high-tech company in China.

This study not only further verified a promotion factor of individual service innovative behavior from the perspective of leader influence, but also enriched the understanding of the positive influence of servant leadership on employees.

This study is the first to examine the relationships among servant leadership, employees' intrinsic motivation, identification with the leader and service innovative behavior. The results may help to open the “black box” of the relationship between servant leadership and employees' service innovative behavior by introducing their intrinsic motivation. The conclusions also indicate employees' identification with the leader is an important boundary condition among their relationships. Particularly, it not only moderates the relationship between servant leadership and intrinsic motivation, but also moderates the mediating role of intrinsic motivation.

Drawing from the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, the authors’ study examines the impact of high commitment HR management (HCHRM) practices and psychological capital (PsyCap) on job autonomy and job demands in predicting burnout in frontline food service employees.

A moderated mediation model was developed and tested on 257 Australian workers employed in the food service industry. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

There was support for the mediation effect of HCHRM on burnout, via two sequential mediators: job autonomy and job demands. PsyCap was found to buffer (moderation) the effect of job demands on burnout. Frontline employees also perceived HCHRM to be a “negative signal” that was implemented for the good of management.

The authors are aware of the potential of common method variance due to the cross-sectional research design. Future research should adopt a longitudinal research design or collect data from several sources of informants. As the authors did not find support for the optimistic perspective hypothesis, despite its theoretical and empirical relevance under JD-R and COR perspectives, they call for further research exploring the link between HRM, job design and psychological conditions in promoting employee wellbeing.

Burnout is one of the most common and critical health issues faced by frontline food service employees. Food service organizations have to strategize their management practices to reduce employees' experience with burnout by implementing high commitment enhancing HR practices and developing employees' PsyCap.

This study provided a better understanding of how (macro) HCHRM practices as an organizational resource reduce burnout of frontline food service employees via two (micro) mediators: job autonomy and job demands. PsyCap is an important personal resource that lessens burnout, consistent with the COR theory. These findings contribute to the literature on strategic HRM and its relationship to employee wellbeing.

The different dimensions and contexts within which value is co-created has generated varied views of how value is understood or formed. This study aims to examine employee-guest perceived value as important factors for the successful implementation of value co-creation (VCC).

The study employs an interpretive paradigm, using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation in a qualitative design to increase understanding of employee-guest perceived value to aid the implementation of VCC at the dyadic level.

Findings highlight eight value perceptions including value for money, hotel location, physical evidence, mutual respect, appreciation, safety & security, quality & varieties of food and technological characteristics of service as important factors for the successful implementation of VCC at the dyadic level.

Generalisability of the findings is a limitation not only due to the smaller sample size but also due to industry-specific context. The study follows rigorous procedures to minimise biases, yet research limitation is acknowledged from the researcher’s participation in the research process.

The notion that actor’s assess value differently from the same service suggests that diverse service elements might be experienced differently. This study provides insights for hotel managers to recognise not only individuals’ value preferences but also service types that reflect employee-guest collective service preferences for sustainability.

This study integrates and extends extant literature by examining employees’ and guests’ individual and collective views at distinct hotel contexts to gain useful insights into value and VCC. The study proposes a framework that hospitality firms can use to address service failure and competition-related issues.