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The purpose of this paper is to integrate tenets from the appraisal-based model of self-conscious emotions and the compass of shame theory to examine restaurant frontline employees’ experience of shame following service failures, and how shame influences employees’ job attitude and behaviors. In addition, employees’ industry tenure is identified as an individual factor influencing the impacts of shame in resorting to literature on aging in emotion regulation.

Using a survey methodology, 217 restaurant frontline employees and their supervisors in Turkey provided survey data. Partial least squares (PLS) method using SmartPLS 3.3.3 was used for data analysis.

The results indicated the maladaptive nature of shame following service failures as a salient self-conscious emotion, as it was negatively related to employee outcomes. Moreover, employees’ industry tenure played a moderating role that influences the impacts of shame on commitment to customer service.

Managers should attend to frontline employees’ shame experience depending on their industry experience and adopt appropriate emotion intervention (e.g. cognitive reappraisal) or create error management culture to eliminate the negative effects of shame.

This study advances our understanding of a powerful but understudied emotional experience, shame, in a typical shame-eliciting hospitality work setting (e.g. service failures). Shame has been linked with commitment to customer service and error reporting. In addition, industry tenure has been identified as a boundary condition to help clarify previous inconsistent findings in regard to the adaptive/maladaptive nature of shame.

Vicarious abusive supervision (VAS) has recently garnered the attention of hospitality researchers. VAS is prevalent in hospitality work settings characterized by long production chains and open operating environments. Based on the conservation of resources (CORs) theory, this study aims to examine how VAS influences hospitality employees’ work behaviours (i.e. supervisor-directed deviance, silence and helping behaviour) via affective rumination, with the moderating role of industry tenure as an individual contingency on the relationship between VAS and affective rumination.

The data were gathered from 233 restaurant frontline employees and their supervisors in Turkey. The authors tested the proposed model using partial least squares method through SmartPLS 3.

The results reveal that VAS triggers affective rumination, which, in turn, is positively related to supervisor-directed deviance and silence, and negatively related to helping behaviour. Moreover, industry tenure, as a buffer resource, significantly moderates the relationship between VAS and affective rumination.

To reduce the occurrence of VAS and mitigate its negative effects, managers should establish a work environment that embraces understanding and respect, pay attention to how they communicate with employees, implement appropriate interventions when VAS occurs and conduct stress management training and improve employees’ emotion regulation skills in ways that correspond to the employees’ industry experience.

This study advances research on VAS by offering insight into how VAS impacts employees’ work behaviours via the underlying mechanism of affective rumination through a COR lens. The findings also shed light on the salient buffering effect of industry tenure as an individual contingency.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how managers react to their own abusive supervision. Accordingly, this research identified a mechanism that managers may use to make amends for their abusive supervisory behaviors.

Two studies were designed. Study 1 was an online experimental study involving 99 full-time managers in the hotel industry that examined how managers’ internal factors moderated the relationship between enacted abusive supervision and embarrassment. By applying a critical incident technique to survey 235 full-time managers in the hospitality industry in Study 2, the moderating role of power distance belief as a context-related factor was tested. Furthermore, the mediating role of embarrassment between managers’ abusive supervision and their impression management was examined.

Managers who enact abusive supervision may experience embarrassment and thus be more likely to use impression management tactics, such as apology. Moreover, this study revealed the boundary conditions that influence managers’ reaction toward their own abusive supervision.

Hospitality industry practitioners can use the findings of this study as a basis for the development of policies and training programs to promote positive organizational culture and minimize unethical workplace behaviors.

Previous studies in this area have focused on subordinate-centric perspectives; this study is one of the few that has examined abusive supervision from an actor-centric perspective.

This systematic review synthesizes the recent literature (2010–2020) on hospitality employees’ emotions, affect and moods. This study has three objectives: to clarify the definitions of emotions, affect and moods; to explain how theories are integrated into understanding hospitality employees’ emotions, affect and moods; and to assess how emotions, affect and moods are measured.

Using seven major databases, the authors selected 61 peer-reviewed academic journal articles published in hospitality outlets for review. We based our study on five stages of conducting a systematic review: scoping, planning, identification, screening and eligibility.

Affect is an umbrella term encompassing moods and emotions. Emotions are distinct from emotion-laden constructs, such as emotional labor and emotional intelligence. Theories on conservation of resources, emotional labor and social exchange have been most frequently used to understand hospitality employees’ emotions. However, they overlooked the dynamic nature of emotions when using these theories. Hospitality researchers often used a subset of the positive and negative affect scale and did not discuss back-translation.

Hospitality employees’ emotions lead to far-reaching consequences in attitudes, intentions and behaviors in work and non-work domains. Effective practices (e.g. creating a supportive climate) that help evoke positive employee emotions and reduce negative employee emotions are thus desirable.

Our findings crystallize the understanding of emotions, affect and moods of hospitality employees. We further provide a roadmap for future research on hospitality employees’ emotions. Data triangulation, cross-cultural research and mixed emotions are novel opportunities for future research.

This daily diary study aims to examine the influences of daily poor sleep quality on employees’ emotional exhaustion at work via negative affect at home. Additionally, this study examines the moderating effects of day-level customer mistreatment and person-level workplace mindfulness in hotel frontline employees’ daily spillover from the nonwork domain to the work domain.

An experience sampling method was applied, and the survey data were collected from 98 frontline service employees in the hotel industry in China. This study included a one-time initial survey and a ten-day daily diary study.

This study reveals that frontline service employees’ poor sleep quality of the previous night influences their emotional exhaustion after work through negative affect at home. On days when employees perceived a low level of customer mistreatment, the daily positive association between negative affect at home and emotional exhaustion after work would be attenuated. Moreover, employees with a higher level of workplace mindfulness are less likely to be influenced by the negative affect at home.

This study suggests that hospitality organizations should extend their focus on caring about employees’ nonwork life quality, such as improving daily sleep quality and providing workplace mindfulness trainings.

This study adds to the current literature on work and nonwork spillover by considering the spillover process from employees’ nonwork domains to work domains by taking a dynamic and multilevel perspective.

On the basis of conservation of resources theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a framework linking an organizational factor, organizational error tolerance, with employees’ psychological well-being through gains of psychological resources: perceived organizational support (POS) and organization-based self-esteem (OBSE).

Across three-wave data collected from 220 hotel frontline employees, this study tests the proposed model using structural equation modeling through AMOS.

Employees’ perceived organizational error tolerance positively influenced their psychological well-being through significant sequential mediation effects of POS and OBSE.

This study contributes to the existing literature of psychological resources, positive psychology and error management by providing insights into how organizational practice in error situations can be positively related to employees’ psychological well-being.

This paper identifies error-related organizational practices as precursor of individual psychological well-being and explores the non-work-related outcome variable of error management for the first time. The examination of the linkage between organizational error tolerance and employees’ psychological well-being via the underlying mechanism of psychological resources provides the insight into how resources dynamics play important roles in influencing employees’ psychological well-being.

Hospitality work setting is error-prone, rendering error handling critical for effective organizational operation and quality of service delivery. An organization’s attitude toward errors can be traced back to one fundamental question: should errors be tolerated/accepted or not? This study aims to examine the relationships between error tolerance and hospitality employees’ three critical work behaviors, namely, learning behavior, error reporting and service recovery performance. Psychological safety and self-efficacy are hypothesized to be the underlying attitudinal mechanisms that link error tolerance with these behavioral outcomes.

This study relied on a survey methodology, collecting data from 304 frontline restaurant employees in Turkey and their direct supervisors. SPSS 25.0 and Amos 25.0 were used for analysis.

The results revealed that error tolerance had direct positive relationships with employees’ psychological safety and self-efficacy, both of which had positive impacts on learning behavior and error reporting. In addition, learning behavior positively influenced employees’ service recovery performance, as rated by the employees’ supervisors.

This study identifies error tolerance as an organizational distal factor that influences employees’ learning behavior, error reporting and service recovery performance; and identifies self-efficacy and psychological safety as mediators of the relationship between error tolerance and behavioral outcomes. The findings help clarify the longstanding debate over the relationship between an organization’s attitude toward errors and its employees’ learning behavior. The findings also shed light on the advantages of tolerating error occurrence for organizations, which is especially important as most hospitality organizations pursue perfection with aversive attitudes toward errors.

Considerable research has examined the negative consequences of customer incivility on employees (e.g. turnover intention and sabotage behavior toward the customer). However, there is scant research investigating how other customers, as observers, may react to incivility. This knowledge gap should be filled because hospitality services are often consumed in the public setting where customers can observe and be influenced by each other. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by examining observing customers’ willingness to revisit the company following customer incivility.

Participants are American consumers recruited from a crowdsourced online panel. Two scenario-based experimental studies in the restaurant setting are conducted. Customer incivility and relationship norms (communal versus exchange) are manipulated, while relationship closeness is measured.

Study 1 shows that following fellow customer incivility (vs civility), observing customers’ intention to revisit the company was lower when they perceive a distant relationship with the employee. This intention did not differ regardless of incivility and civility when they perceive a close relationship with the employee. Study 2 shows that when observing customers perceive a communal relationship with the employee, their revisit intention was even higher following customer incivility (vs civility).

Hospitality managers need to train employees to identify signs of customer incivility and assume appropriate actions to reduce the negative consequences on observers. Hospitality managers should also communicate their expectations for respectful customer behaviors through an organization-wide campaign. Finally, hospitality businesses should foster a close relationship with their customers, particularly a communal relationship to offset the negative consequences of customer incivility on observers.

This study adds to previous research by challenging the universally negative view of customer incivility. The authors do so by examining the moderating effects of relationship closeness and norms in observer reactions to customer incivility. This study contributes to previous research drawing on script theory and deontic justice theory.

Online reviews are perceived as credible and trustworthy across various business sectors; thus, they influence customers’ purchase decisions. However, the potential role of customer online reviews as feedback for employee performance and employee reactions to customer reviews remain largely unclear. To address this knowledge gap, this study proposes that employee characteristics, namely, self-efficacy (Study 1) and moral identity (Study 2), moderate the effect of the valence of customer reviews on hospitality employees’ helping behavior.

The authors used a scenario-based, quasi-experimental design in two studies. They recruited a total of 215 frontline employees at independent casual dining restaurants in Istanbul, Turkey (Study 1) and 226 US residents who have worked in the restaurant industry for more than six months (Study 2). Multiple linear regressions via PROCESS and moderation analysis via Johnson–Neyman technique were used.

Study 1 demonstrates that when employees’ self-efficacy is low, positive (vs negative) customer reviews enhance employees’ helping behavior. By contrast, when employees’ self-efficacy is high, their helping behavior is invariantly high regardless of the valence of customer reviews. Study 2 reveals that when employees’ moral identity is low, their helping behavior decreases in the presence of negative (vs positive) customer reviews. Conversely, when employees’ moral identity is high, their helping behavior is similarly high regardless of the valence of customer reviews.

Hospitality managers may need to develop training programs to enhance their employees’ self-efficacy and moral identity. They may also provide necessary organizational support to induce their employees’ self-efficacy and moral identity, given that such psychological resources help buffer the dampening effect of negative reviews on helping behavior. Last, hospitality managers may consider incorporating customer reviews as part of employee performance feedback.

This study advances the understanding of employees’ responses to customer reviews, with the performance appraisal feedback framework as fresh theoretical lens. This study is among the first to demonstrate the relationship between the valence of customer reviews and subsequent helping behavior of employees toward customers. It also contributes to the emerging literature that identifies boundary conditions for employees’ responses to customer reviews.

This study aims to explore an emerging phenomenon – gourmet meal kits delivered to out-of-towners from iconic local restaurants. This study explores the interplay of goal framing and basic needs and their effects on customer intentions. This study also examines the underlying mechanism of experience cocreation and the moderating effect of food involvement.

This study develops a framework that combines the self-determination theory (SDT) and customer experience cocreation. Two online experimental studies involving 478 US consumers were conducted to examine the underlying mechanism of customers’ decision-making on purchasing gourmet meal kits (Study 1) and visiting destination restaurants after receiving the meal kit (Study 2).

Intrinsic goal-framing leads to stronger intentions to purchase gourmet meal kits and to visit destination restaurants that sell meal kits. In contrast, extrinsic goal-framing enhances the positive influence of perceived relatedness and competence on behavioral intentions. The effects of goal framing and basic needs on behavioral intentions are moderated by food involvement and mediated by experience cocreation to varying degrees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to empirically examine an emerging business model – delivering restaurants’ food experiences to out-of-towners. The study also expands the application of the SDT by incorporating customer cocreation as the underlying mechanism.