A Postdigital Perspective on Service Work: Salespeople’s Service Encounters in the Connected Store

Covid-19 has disrupted global markets, accelerated the digital transformation of frontline service, and changed how service organisations, frontline service employees, and consumers interact. This article explores how digitalisation is changing retail service work from a postdigital perspective. The article draws on an ethnography of salespeople’s service encounters in speciality chain stores between July 2015 and August 2021. Using a practice theory framework (the theory of practice architectures), the article explores what conditions form salespeople’s service encounters in connected stores and how retail organisations’ digitalisation of frontline service changes salespeople’s practice of service encounters. The contributions of this article to the ongoing debate over the digitalisation of service work are twofold. On the theoretical plane, the article provides an alternative framework to labour process theory for exploring and describing service work organised around digital technologies. Secondly, it uncovers the conditions that are changing salespeople’s practice of service encounters, along with attributes associated with service work and emotional labour skills. The research shows that the connected service encounter is characterised by postdigital dialogue that involves new roles and skills in frontline service work. Overall, the findings contribute to a better understanding of how digitalisation changes action and interaction in service encounters from an employee perspective.

The role of initiative climate as a resource caravan passageway in developing proactive service performance

PurposeThe study aims to examine the role of initiative climate as a resource caravan passageway in engaging employees and developing a proactive frontline service workforce to identify the mechanisms whereby scarce resources efficiently yielding the desired outcomes can help organizations improve productivity and gain competitive advantage, thereby helping clarify the leadership–performance relationship in service organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a quantitative research design with a cross-sectional survey conducted among frontline hospitality employees in Malaysia. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to examine the hypothesized relationships.FindingsThe initiative climate is significant as a resource caravan passageway to transmit the positive impact of interpersonal leadership onto the engagement and proactive performance of frontline hospitality employees in whom initiative climate and employee engagement sequentially mediated the relationship between interpersonal leadership and proactive service performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe online data collection procedure conducted through LinkedIn and Facebook and cross-sectional, self-reported survey method are significant limitations of the current study.Practical implicationsThe findings of the study will aid in developing organizational interventions for an engaged and proactive frontline service workforce, as interpersonal leadership can positively impact the engagement and proactive behavior of frontline service employees via initiative climate. Therefore, hospitality managers should value interpersonal leadership and initiative climate as coexisting organizational resources.Originality/valueThe study shows the significance of initiative climate in the relationships between interpersonal leadership, employee engagement and the proactive performance of frontline service employees.

“My colleague is a robot” – exploring frontline employees' willingness to work with collaborative service robots

PurposeAs service robots increasingly interact with customers at the service encounter, they will inevitably become an integral part of employee's work environment. This research investigates frontline employee's perceptions of collaborative service robots (CSR) and introduces a new framework, willingness to collaborate (WTC), to better understand employee–robot interactions in the workplace.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on appraisal theory, this study employed an exploratory research approach to investigate frontline employees' cognitive appraisal of service robots and their WTC with their nonhuman counterparts in service contexts. Data collection consisted of 36 qualitative problem-centered interviews. Following an iterative thematic analysis, the authors introduce a research framework of frontline employees' WTC with service robots.FindingsFirst, this study demonstrates that the interaction between frontline employees and service robots is a multistage appraisal process based on adoption-related perceptions. Second, it identifies important attributes across three categories (employee, robot and job attributes) that provide a foundation to understand the appraisal of CSRs. Third, it presents four employee personas (supporter, embracer, resister and saboteur) that provide a differentiated perspective of how service employee–robot collaboration may differ.Practical implicationsThe article identifies important factors that enable and restrict frontline service employees' (FSEs’) WTC with robots.Originality/valueThis is the first paper that investigates the appraisal of CSRs from the perspective of frontline employees. The research contributes to the limited research on human–robot collaboration and expands existing technology acceptance models that fall short to explain post-adoptive coping behavior of service employees in response to service robots in the workplace.

It Went Downhill From There: The Spillover Effect from Previous Customer Mistreatment on Frontline Employees’ Service Delivery

Research indicates that a customer’s service experience is shaped by their past experiences with the firm. However, the extent to which past experiences with customers shape frontline service employees’ delivery of services has not been examined. We propose that the analysis of service encounters as discrete, independent units ignores possible linkages between customer experiences via frontline employees. Adopting a resource spill-over perspective across two studies, we find that employees’ experience of customer mistreatment compromised their subsequent service delivery. Using an experiment in Study 1, we find that these effects are mediated by changes in the employee’s self-control capacity. Using a field sample in Study 2, we find that these effects are moderated by the employee’s dispositional self-control capacity and their motivation to commit to display rules. Our findings show how service encounter outcomes can be shaped by distal service events and call for a more holistic understanding of the forces that shape service encounter outcomes. In particular, by highlighting the potential consequences, our findings challenge conventional work protocols that compel employees to persevere despite their experience of mistreatment. By detailing the mediating and moderating mechanisms of mistreatment spill-over in service organizations, we highlight the recovery mechanisms and practices that enable FLEs to remain resilient despite negative encounters with customers.

Predicting Service Recovery Performance through Job Crafting Perception and Behaviour: Does Proactivity Make a Difference?

The central aim of this study is to investigate whether the proactive personality (PP) of frontline service employees moderates the impact of perceived opportunity to craft (POC) on actual job crafting (JC) behaviour. We also examine the consequent effect of JC on employee work engagement (WE) and perceived service recovery performance (SRP). Primary data collected from 624 dyads of Indian frontline banking employees and their immediate colleagues (peers) formed the basis of empirical analysis. Data on JC perception, WE and JC behaviour was self-reported by the employees. On the other hand, peer-rating was invited for frontline employees’ PP and recovery performance. Empirical results indicated that the likelihood of POC resulting in actual JC is significantly higher for proactive employees in comparison to their reactive counterparts. The results also suggest that JC nurtures WE which, in turn, enhances SRP.

Four Decades of Frontline Service Employee Research: An Integrative Bibliometric Review

We conducted a comprehensive review of empirical research related to frontline service employees over the past four decades (1980-2020). Utilizing a bibliometric mapping approach, we identified 630 relevant articles appearing in service, management, marketing, and applied/occupational health psychology journals. Our analysis identified five distinct research clusters: (a) collective predictors and effects, (b) services encounters, (c) emotional regulation and management, (d) customer orientation, and (e) service stress and strain. In this article, we describe the nature of current research within each of these clusters and identify future directions within and across different clusters for scholarly work. Our review highlights the conceptual and methodological richness within the clusters and calls out for interdisciplinary scholarship to build a diverse, yet unified field of service work research.