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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.

In this study the authors examined the impact of employees' collaborative behaviours with colleagues and customers (i.e. employee–employee collaboration and employee–customer collaboration) on their creative self-efficacy and service innovation from the perspective of service-dominant logic. The authors also examined the differences between frontline and non-frontline fitness service employees in our research model. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

Participants were fitness-centre employees in Taiwan recruited via convenience sampling. A total of 410 participants completed our online survey, and the authors analysed the data using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The authors found that collaboration with both colleagues and customers had a positive impact on employees' creative self-efficacy. Collaboration with colleagues directly affected service innovation, while collaboration with customers indirectly affected service innovation via creative self-efficacy. In addition, there was a significant difference between frontline and non-frontline employees in our research model. Specifically, the path from collaboration with customers to creative self-efficacy was stronger for frontline employees, and the path from creative self-efficacy to service innovation was stronger for non-frontline employees.

This study improves the understanding of the way in which different collaborative behaviours promote employees' creative self-efficacy and service innovation. Further, it is the first to identify the difference between frontline and non-frontline employees and it shows how the effects of collaborative behaviours differ between them in the context of fitness services.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain the relationships between empowering leadership and a humorous work climate; and service employees' creativity and innovative behaviour in frontline service jobs.

A model of causal relationships is presented, along with formulated hypotheses. The data were collected with a survey answered by frontline service employees in hotels.

The findings indicate a strong relationship between frontline cognitive creativity production of novel ideas and the behavioural implementation of these ideas into their respective work role. Moreover, the empirical findings indicate that both empowering leadership and a humorous work climate are able to trigger frontline service employees' creativity. In addition service employees' creativity appears to be a mediating variable in the relationship between empowering leadership, a humorous work climate, and the service employees' innovative behaviour.

This study limits its focus on two factors: the stimulation of service employees' creativity and innovative behaviour in frontline service jobs, both of which offer opportunities for further research.

This study has indicated that both leadership practice and work climate play important roles in explaining service employees' creativity and innovative behaviour. In particular, managers should be aware of their empowering practices, as well focusing on the degree of a humorous work climate. An important practical managerial implication from the findings is to take humour into account and consequently to develop and implement strategies followed by necessary actions to manage humour in an appropriate manner in service organizations.

The reported study contributes to enhancing the knowledge of the roles of empowering leadership and a humorous work climate for service employees' creativity and innovative behaviour in frontline service jobs.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the roles that service employees’ responses to high job demands play in service innovation, by examining the effects that service employees’ motivational orientation in self-regulation (regulatory focus) and their emotional labour strategy have on their creativity.

By integrating regulatory focus theory and emotion regulation theory, the authors developed a theoretical model to propose the links between promotion and prevention regulatory foci, different emotional labour strategies and frontline employee creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear model based on data collected from 304 frontline employees and 72 supervisors in 51 restaurants.

The results showed that promotion focus was positively related to frontline employee creativity while prevention focus was negatively related to it. In addition, both emotional labour strategies (deep acting and surface acting) mediated the effect of promotion focus on frontline employee creativity. Surface acting mediated the effect of prevention focus on frontline employee creativity.

This is the first research conducted to explain, from a self-regulatory perspective, the influence that is exerted on service employees’ service innovation by their responses to high job demands. The findings identify the effects that service employees’ promotion focus or prevention focus in self-regulation have on their creativity, and the data unravel the role of emotional labour strategy as the mediating mechanism that explains the influence of regulatory focus on service employee creativity. On the basis of the findings, managerial directions are offered with regard to managing service employees’ regulatory focus and emotional labour, with a view to enhancing the creativity and innovation within a service organisation.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the importance of employees to the success of service firms, research into how well frontline service staff understand service remains scarce. This study aims to investigate what constitutes good customer service from the viewpoint of frontline service employees and to explore gender differences in particular.

The data were collected from 876 frontline employees across a wide range of service industries. An automated text analysis using Leximancer explored general and gender‐specific patterns in employees' customer service understanding.

Irrespective of gender, frontline service staff share the perception that the pillars of good customer service are listening skills, making the customer happy, and offering service. Males have a more functional, outcome‐oriented interpretation of customer service; females focus more on the actual service interaction and emotional outcomes.

By acknowledging gender‐based dissimilarities in the customer service understanding of frontline service employees, the efficiency of recruitment and training processes will be enhanced.

This study contributes to limited work on service models of frontline staff and shows that gender can explain some differences. This study also adds another dimension to the understanding of gender effects in services, beyond its influence on customers' quality perceptions and behaviours. The results are important for services marketing research and for managers in charge of recruiting and training frontline service staff.

Drawing on the branded service encounters perspective, the purpose of this study is to investigate how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ brand evaluations.

The research conducted two experiments. The first experiment explored the effect of frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations via corporate hypocrisy. The second experiment explored the moderation effect of employees’ prototypicality and the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among customers.

Experiment 1 indicates that for firms with a green brand image, frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors result in customers’ perception that the firm is hypocritical, thus reducing their brand evaluations. Experiment 2 shows that employee prototypicality and CSR importance to the customer enhance the negative impact of frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations through customers’ perception of corporate hypocrisy.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employees.

This study suggests that firms’ green brand image does not always lead to positive customer response. When frontline employees’ behaviors are inconsistent with firms’ green brand image, it can trigger customers’ perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and thus influence their brand evaluations. Therefore, firms should train frontline service employees to make their behaviors align with the firms’ green brand image.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employee.

Business-to-business (B2B) firms increasingly have a need for frontline sales employees who can both sell and service customer account, a task known as sales-service ambidexterity which may pose significant challenges to frontline sales employees. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to show that one has to be cognizant of the potential negative consequences brought about requiring frontline sales employees to engage in sales-service ambidexterity and find a way to mitigate such negative consequences.

The multisource data for this study was collected from frontline sales employees and their respective supervisors working across multiple B2B pharmaceutical companies in a Southeast Asian country. The data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and PROCESS Macro.

The results reveal a negative indirect effect of sales-service ambidexterity sales performance through role overload. This negative indirect effect is fully neutralized when information exchange is high but not when it is low.

This study underscores the importance of not only the negative consequence of sales-service ambidexterity but also offers insights into how this negative consequence is neutralized so that sales performance is maximized.

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.