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This study aims to investigate the impact of service employees’ agreeableness personality and daily self-esteem on their daily interpersonal behaviors in terms of interpersonal harmony and counterproductive work behavior toward other individuals (CWB-I). Furthermore, this study examines whether the impact of daily self-esteem on daily interpersonal behaviors is moderated by the quality of service employees’ relationship with their manager and leader–member exchange (LMX).

Using a sample of 111 restaurant employees in China who took daily surveys with 1,412 ratings for 10 consecutive days, a longitudinal analysis was conducted to test the research hypotheses using hierarchical linear modeling.

The results show that agreeableness personality predicted daily interpersonal harmony but had no significant effect on daily CWB-I. It was also found that daily self-esteem predicted both daily interpersonal harmony and daily CWB-I, and LMX moderated the effect of daily self-esteem on daily interpersonal behaviors.

Given the fluctuation of employees’ interpersonal behaviors, organizations should guide the variability of interpersonal behaviors in the positive direction. To promote daily interpersonal harmony and reduce daily CWB-I, managers could focus on recruiting employees with agreeableness, offering daily self-esteem training and enhancing the quality of LMX.

This research is unique in its objectives to examine what influences service employees’ interpersonal behaviors on a daily basis and its methods to implement a longitudinal approach unlike previous studies that often relied on cross-sectional designs to enhance the ecological validity of the findings.