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This research aimed to fill several gaps in the tipping literature which has overlooked the server's perspective in identifying and understanding variables that influence a tip amount and therefore where they concentrate their efforts during the service encounter. Furthermore, the extant literature has theorized how or why certain variables influence the tip amount, but these studies fail to capture insight from server's which would supplement the theory and provide a more in-depth understanding of the mechanisms at play.

This study adopts a grounded theory approach using semi-structured one-on-one interviews with tipped restaurant employees who were identified and selected using snowball sampling. Content analysis is employed to code and categorize the data.

The content analysis revealed five categories where servers focus their time and effort to earn tips: service quality, connection, personal factors, expertise and food quality. The server's personality was identified as a variable the tipping literature has largely ignored as a determinant of the tip amount. Server's shift their style of service for groups of eight or more people, and for regular customers, who must dine in the restaurant at least once per week. Lastly, despite the many drawbacks associated with working for tips, servers would not want to replace it with any other method of compensation.

This is the first qualitative study focused on understanding the server's role in the service exchange relationship since McCarty et al. (1990) study. The results provide new insights on the often-studied variables from the tipping literature.

The present study aims to examine the different restaurant tipping systems on perceived fairness, distributive justice, and control from employees' perspective.

Five different written scenarios of tipping systems were depicted in the present study. A total of 205 restaurant employees were assigned to each of the five groups and responded to a written scenario. Data were collected during the restaurants' briefings. Participants were asked to read the scenario and to fill out a survey instrument. Researchers administered surveys to 12 different casual‐dining, full‐service restaurants.

Results indicate that when the service charge is added onto customers' bill and onto all tips collected for equal distribution among servers, this enhanced the employees' perception of fairness and distributive justice. Further, the traditional (non‐equal sharing) tipping system of keeping tips all to oneself is perceived as most fair and just to participants. However, in terms of equal sharing of tips, employees perceived sharing among all servers as more fair than the other tipping systems that include back‐of‐the‐house employees.

The current study has a number of limitations. First, researchers had very little control with regard to the accuracy of the procedure due to the use of professional‐oriented sample versus student‐oriented sample. Consequently, some demographic data were missing. Second, as much as the authors would like more back‐of‐the‐house participants, the majority of the participants (94 percent) were front‐line servers of the restaurants. Third, the results of this study can only be generalized to restaurant employees in casual full‐service dining restaurants. Finally, there is limited literature available specifically focusing on employees' preferences of different restaurant tipping systems; as a result consider this study as exploratory research.

In order to satisfy FOH employees, restaurant managers should consider implementing tipping systems that permit front‐line servers to keep all the tips they earn to themselves. In some conditions, it is appropriate to include a service charge – the sample indicated this system as the next best choice.

No research has been done investigating the different restaurant tipping systems and on perceived fairness, distributive justice, and control from employees' perspective in actual restaurant settings using professional‐oriented sample, and including front‐ and back‐of‐the‐house employees.

In hotels, room attendants are often invisible to hotel guests. This study aims to understand how customers would increase their voluntary tips when there was less or no personal interaction and communication between customers and service providers. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether providing different greeting cards in hotel rooms would affect hotel guest tipping behavior.

A field study was conducted in an upscale independent hotel. Four types of greeting cards through two personalized factors, perceived effort and personalization, were placed in the hotel rooms. The tipping amount for each room-night was recorded during the data collection.

There were 3,285 room-nights tip records collected in this study. The results indicated that non-personalized housekeeping greeting cards did not increase the likelihood of guests to tip, but they may increase the average tipping amount; the personalization of greeting cards from room attendants had positive effects on guest tipping behavior; the hand-written greeting card and name-introduction greeting card were predictors that can significantly increase the likelihood of hotel guests to tip.

The empirical research results support social presence theory. With more consistent tipping in hotel rooms, attendants may be able to predict tips through their job performance; thus, creating a win-win in the lodging industry.

This study contributes to understanding guest-tipping behavior in the hotel rooms.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the business issues surrounding tipping and its alternatives, to summarize what is known about those issues, and to identify questions in need of further research.

Objectives are achieved via conceptual analysis and review of relevant literature.

The paper finds that voluntary tipping, service charges, and service‐inclusive pricing offer different sets of costs and benefits, so that no one policy is always the best. The principal benefits to service firms of voluntary tipping are that it lowers nominal prices, increases profits through price discrimination, motivates up‐selling and service, attracts talented workers, and lowers FICA tax payments. However, tipping also motivates discrimination in service delivery, gives servers surplus income that could go the firms' bottom line, increases the risk of income tax audits, and opens firms up to adverse impact lawsuits.

No one tipping policy is always the best. Service industry executives and managers should carefully weigh each of eight different issues (outlined together for the first time here) to identify the best tipping policy for their circumstances.

Tipping has received little attention in service marketing. Furthermore, there is no good, published source of guidance to help service industry executives and managers make decisions about tipping policies. This paper addresses these voids by providing and discussing a comprehensive list of the pros and cons of tipping and its alternatives from a business perspective.

The extra-low minimum wage for US restaurant workers has remained unchanged for over 30 years. Periodic campaigns have brought this wage, and its connection to the perpetuation of inequality and exploitative work, to public attention, but these campaigns have met resistance from both employers and restaurant workers. This article draws on a workplace ethnography in a restaurant front-of-house, and in-depth interviews with tipped food service workers, to examine the tipped labour process and begin to answer a central question: why would any workers oppose a wage increase? It argues that the constituting of tips as a formal wage created for workers a two-employer problem, wherein customers assume the role of secondary, unregulated, employers in the workplace. Ultimately, the tipped wage poses a longer-term strategic obstacle for workers in their position relative to management and ability to organize to shape the terms and conditions of their work.

Crises threaten the operations of small businesses and endanger their survival; however, when the crisis is not attributable to the firm, consumers may rally around the business. This study aims to examine how attitudes toward helping others can create support for small businesses, which in turn can direct consumers to help businesses with increased financial support. It is hoped that this paper will inform how consumers will help firms pivot during crises.

A conceptual model was proposed which linked support for helping others to increased willingness to tip/amount tipped. The model was tested using structural equation modeling from two surveys given to customers of two small businesses, a coffee shop and an independent movie theater, respectively.

During a crisis, support for helping others has a positive impact on feelings of support for small businesses. Consumers direct their support to small businesses that they are interested in seeing survive and continue operations. They either tip more or tip when they otherwise would not have tipped.

Firms that pivot their operations because of a crisis imposed on them can still generate revenues. Consumers who have a self-interest in the continuing operations of the firm want to support it, and by pivoting their business model, the firm gives consumers the opportunity to give the firm and its employees more than they would have in the form of tips.

Prior work in crisis management has focused primarily on how firms recover and respond to a crisis of their doing. Overwhelmingly, consumers have been shown to punish firms during times of crisis. However, for a crisis that is imposed on the firm, consumers may rally behind the firm and respond by supporting it more than they are required to.

Advances in information technology have enabled new ways of organizing work and led to a proliferation of what is known as the “gig economy.” While much attention has been paid to how these new organizational designs have upended traditional employee–employer relationships, there has been little consideration of how these changes have impacted the social norms and expectations that govern the relationship between workers and consumers. The purpose of this paper is to consider the social norm of tipping and propose that gig work is associated with a breakdown of tipping norms in part because of workers’ increased autonomy in terms of deciding when and whether to work.

The authors present four studies to support their hypothesis: a survey vignette experiment with workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Study 1), an analysis of New York City taxi data (Study 2), a field experiment with restaurant employee food delivery drivers (Study 3) and a field experiment with gig-worker food delivery drivers (Study 4).

In Studies 1 and 2, they find that consumers are less likely to tip when workers have autonomy in deciding whether to complete a task. In Study 3, they find that restaurant delivery employees notice upfront tips (or lack thereof) and alter their service as a result. In contrast, in Study 4, they find that gig-workers who agree to complete a delivery for a fixed amount that includes an upfront tip (or lack thereof) are not responsive to tips. Together, these findings suggest that the gig economy has not only transformed employee-employer relationships, but has also altered the norms and expectations of consumers and workers.

The authors present four different studies that consider the social norm of tipping in the context of gig work. Together, they highlight that perceptions of worker autonomy have driven the decline in tipping norms associated with gig work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between perceived dependence on tips and vulnerability to sexual harassment (SH) among hotel employees in Accra Metropolis, Ghana.

Within a cross-sectional research design, 583 employees from 55 hotels completed self-administered questionnaires. Descriptive statistics, χ² test of independence, Kruskal–Wallis test were used to analyse collected data.

Results of the study reveal that dependence on tips is related to SH vulnerability of food and beverage staff. Furthermore, dependence on tips engenders a perception of SH climate. Compared to guests and co-workers, supervisors were least identified as perpetrators of SH in hotel workspaces. Guests were responsible for unwanted sexual attention, whereas co-workers pose the greatest risk for gender harassment.

Hotel management should invest in the publication of educational materials such as leaflets and posters indicating unacceptability of inappropriate sexual behaviours.

This paper is one of the pioneers to have assessed the relationship between dependence on tips and perceived climate for SH as well as vulnerability to SH in a hotel context.

Tipping is a phenomenon that illustrates the importance of social norms and psychological reasons in motivating economic behavior. People tip because this is the social norm and disobeying the norm results in psychological disutility. Tipping is also economically important: in the USA alone, millions of workers derive most of their income from tips, and annual tips amount to dozens of billions of dollars. Tipping is also prevalent in numerous other countries around the globe. While tipping has been studied extensively by psychologists, it has received very little attention from economists. In order to encourage other economists to research this interesting phenomenon, the author discusses the implications of tipping for several areas in economics: social economics, behavioral economics, labor economics, and economics of information/management strategy. Also many ideas are provided for future research both as part of the discussion and in the concluding section.

Many service employees rely on non-contractual voluntary customer tips as a major source of their income. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the relationship between the service employee’s cognitive evaluation of the tip (expectations-disconfirmation tip gap), affective state (AS) and displayed emotions (DE) toward customers in the workplace.

An experimental, between-subjects, scenario-based research design was conducted on 107 waiters in the US restaurant industry. A simple mediation model was first tested, before testing a more complex moderated mediation model that was developed to investigate if employees self-control (SC) moderates the relationship between the employees tip gap, AS, and DE.

An employee’s negative disconfirmation tip gap negatively influences the employee’s AS, which in turn results in negative DE toward customers in the workplace. However, an employee’s positive tip gap does not positively influence the employee’s AS, relative to the control. In addition, employees’ SC does not moderate the relationship, which suggests that when employees experience negative tip disconfirmation they may openly violate the service provider’s display rules and service scripts, and display negative emotions toward customers in the workplace.

The scenario-based research design was limited to self-reported perceived levels of SC and DE. The scenario was also limited to one country and one tipping context (i.e. restaurants). Future studies could compliment these findings by conducting both qualitative studies, and survey research that relies on actual tipping data or re-enactments of actual service encounters.

Service managers not only need to manage display rules and service scripts to influence employee DE, but also need to manage employee tip expectations, especially when employees expect to receive tips that are greater than actual tips (i.e. negative disconfirmation). Communicating and educating employees on customer tipping and what tips to expect should be central to managing employees who rely on customer tips.

Tipping has received very little attention in the services management literature. This study broadens the focus of tipping research in the literature by presenting a more complex expectations-disconfirmation tip gap model.