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The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model in which coworker service sabotage influences hospitality employees’ service creativity via work engagement. It also aims to test the moderating effect of sensitivity to the interpersonal mistreatment of others (SIMO).

A time-lagged questionnaire study was performed in hotels in China. The hypotheses were tested via hierarchical multiple regression.

Coworker service sabotage is indirectly associated with hospitality employees’ service creativity via work engagement. The trait of SIMO buffers the harmful effect of coworker service sabotage.

Although our research design helps mitigate common method bias, it could still exist. Other coworker behaviors that might influence employees were not included in this research. The findings may also be biased due to the restricted sample from China.

Hospitality organizations should take measures to curb service sabotage. Organizations could also provide supportive resources to suppress the negative impacts of coworker service sabotage. Moreover, organizations should motivate those low in SIMO to care more about customers.

The research takes the lead in investigating the outcomes of service sabotage from a third-party perspective. Work engagement is identified as the mechanism for transmitting the impact of coworker service sabotage to employees. Moreover, a new moderator that attenuates the negative effects of coworker service sabotage is found.

This paper investigates gender disparities, daily repercussions, and organizational implications related to customer sexual harassment (CSH) of service workers.

This study employed an experience sampling method across 10 days involving 71 call center employees in South Korea.

Women encountered significantly more instances of daily CSH, which eroded their daily job satisfaction and work engagement. Perceived organizational support and effective customer-service training mitigated the within-person relationship between CSH and job satisfaction, though not work engagement.

Female service employees are more susceptible to daily CSH, likely due to gender-role spillover. They require more robust organizational support and effective customer-service training to buffer the detrimental impacts of CSH on their daily job satisfaction.

In an attempt to understand sexual harassment as a daily experience, this research highlights gender differences in exposure to sexual harassment in workplaces no longer dominated by men and emphasizes the role of organizational resources in alleviating the adverse effects of daily CSH on service employees' well-being.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether emotional deviance in response to customer aggression and employees’ feelings of anger is likely to be influenced by perceived job autonomy. To date, studies on emotional labor have focused primarily on emotional regulation strategies. Little is known about the factors that may serve to increase emotional deviance (i.e. situations in which felt and expressed emotions match but are at odds with organizational display rules).

Three samples of service workers were recruited from northern Israel, and data were collected using self-reported questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analyses.

Study 1 revealed that under conditions of frequent exposure to customer aggression, more perceived job autonomy was associated with more frequent instances of emotional deviance. The results of Study 2 and Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between anger and emotional deviance was stronger for employees reporting high levels of perceived job autonomy.

Given the potentially negative impact of emotional deviance on customer satisfaction, organizations should find a balance between satisfying employees’ desire for control and discretion and ensuring employee compliance with display rules.

This study contributes to the existing literature by pointing out that job autonomy may have a “dark side”, in the sense that it provides employees with a certain level of perceived freedom, which might then be extended to include freedom from rule compliance, especially when negative emotions are experienced.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating effect of psychological well-being between organizational dehumanization and two outcome variables: service recovery performance and service sabotage. This research also investigates whether organizational tenure moderates the relationship between organizational dehumanization and psychological well-being.

Using survey methodology, 200 hotel frontline service employees (FLEs) in Turkey were sampled over two time points. Additionally, employees’ direct supervisors rated their service recovery performance. The partial least squares method, specifically SmartPLS 3.3.3, was used for data analysis.

The results indicate that organizational dehumanization negatively influences employees’ psychological well-being. However, organizational tenure moderates this relationship, in which organizational dehumanization has less of a negative effect on employees’ psychological well-being in those with longer tenure. Psychological well-being was found to mediate the relationship between organizational dehumanization and service recovery performance. Finally, psychological well-being mediates the relationship between organizational dehumanization and service sabotage.

Managers should consider the negative effect organizational dehumanization has on FLEs’ psychological well-being and aim to establish an organizational culture that values these employees as individuals and as invaluable resources for the organization. Further, this study has found that less tenured employees are less likely to have the psychological resources to cope with organizational dehumanization and are more susceptible to decreased productivity (i.e. service recovery performance) and engaging in counterproductive work behaviors (i.e. service sabotage) due to mistreatment in the workplace.

This study furthers our understanding of organizational dehumanization, an understudied concept in hospitality research, which influences employee outcomes. The findings of this study contribute to the advancement of the self-determination theory and how organizational dehumanization impacts psychological well-being. It also contributes to the conservation of resources theory and current literature on service recovery performance and service sabotage.

Service providers can potentially play a critical role in responding to the global refugee crisis. However, recent evidence suggests that local service employees’ negative and inappropriate behavior is hindering efforts to alleviate the problems faced by refugees. As a response to the call to action to engage with the global refugee crisis in service context and adopting the transformative service research perspective, this paper aims to understand service employees’ motivations to engage in sabotage when they interact with refugees in service settings.

This paper focuses on the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey as a context. Using a netnographic study, this study analyzes comments by Turkish service employees in different social media groups and newspapers’ online platforms to reveal the motivations of those employees to engage in sabotage behavior.

The findings of this study revealed employees use five emerging themes as potential motivations to justify their sabotage behavior when serving refugees: perceived scarcity of resources, perceived fairness, perceived identity mismatch, perceived role of government and perceived role of other nations.

The findings of this study have implications for service organizations, communities and governments to manage, change and even remove some of those perceptions that lead to employee sabotage resulting in increased suffering of refugees.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the employee sabotage behavior in the context of serving refugees.

Using employee voice to advocate for customers' requirements, improves hospitality service. Organizations must understand what motivates or deters employee customer-oriented voice behaviour (COVB) to achieve its goals and enhance performance. This research investigates the predictors and outcomes of COVB of front-line employees (FLEs) in the hotel industry.

The study used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to steer the article search, screening, and inclusion. The research identified the extant studies conducted in both, high/low power distance countries that met the search criteria using the databases of SCOPUS, Web of Science, EBSCOHost and through snowballing of references.

The content analysis of 55 selected studies identified four themes that explain FLEs’ COVB in the hospitality industry. These four themes include customer-related, employee-related, organizational and leadership factors. Moreover, it was found that theoretical frameworks of the most of published studies are dominated by social exchange and conservation resource theories.

This study suggests hospitality firms to develop management strategies to foster FLEs COVB especially long-term personality trainings for FLEs is suggested for innovative and novel ideas.

This is the first study, as per our knowledge, on the hospitality industry that has been conducted to analyse and synthesize the literature related to FLEs’ COVB.

This study aims to assess the effect of job insecurity, customer incivility and work–life imbalance on Lebanese bank employee workplace well-being (EWW), while investigating the moderating role that positive and negative affect might have.

Quantitative data was collected from 202 respondents and analyzed using structural equation modeling system through IBM SPSS and AMOS.

Results revealed that each of the independent variables has a negative, statistically significant effect on Lebanese bank EWW. The positive affect and the negative one are shown to have a moderating effect that lessens and boosts, respectively, these negative effects.

The study adds to the literature on EWW while highlighting the high-power distance and collectivist society that the research took place in.

Limitations include the sample size that was hoped to be larger, in addition to the self-reporting issue and what it entails in the data collection process.

The study has many practical implications, including the validation of a questionnaire in a developing Arab country, hence providing a reliable tool for researchers. HR specialists should lean toward applicants with positive affect, ensuring that their workplace is occupied by members with enhanced resilience. Furthermore, employers should support their employees’ professional growth, thus, boosting their employability during turmoil and consequently making them less vulnerable in times of economic recession.

The study’s unique context, depicted in the harsh economic and financial crisis, makes the findings on EWW of a high value.

The purpose of this research is to examine the indirect effect of perceived organizational customer orientation on frontline employees' (FLE) innovative behaviors (via perceived empowerment) as well as the contextual factor of supervisory fairness, which affects the strength of the indirect effect. Drawing on social exchange theory, the authors propose that FLEs' perceived organizational customer orientation positively affects their empowerment and indirectly affects innovative behaviors, and that effect is stronger in a high supervisory fairness condition.

Structural equation modeling of the data collected through a time-lagged survey of 184 employee–supervisor dyads provides support for the hypotheses. From the practitioners' perspective, this study highlights the mechanism through which perceived organizational customer orientation can affect the display of FLEs' innovative behaviors as well as the conditions that strengthen this process.

Perceived organizational customer orientation was positively related to employees' perceived empowerment. Empowerment was positively associated with supervisor-reported innovative behaviors. The indirect effect of perceived organizational customer orientation through employee empowerment on supervisor-reported innovative behaviors was also confirmed. Supervisory fairness significantly moderated the perceived organizational customer orientation and employee empowerment relationship. Finally, the indirect effect of customer orientation on supervisor-reported innovative behaviors through empowerment was significant for both high supervisory fairness and low supervisory fairness; however, the effect was stronger in a high fairness condition.

Service managers can benefit from these findings by improving the work environment characteristics.

This study makes an important contribution to existing research on perceived organizational customer orientation and FLEs' innovative behaviors as extant research has only examined the direct unmediated effect of customer orientation on innovative behaviors. Moreover, the authors’ moderated mediation model presents a new insight into how perceived organizational customer orientation influences FLEs' innovative behaviors and when this effect is more pronounced.

This study aims to examine customer misbehaviour in the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study draws on a cross-sectional survey of employees in the Scottish hospitality sector highlighting customer misbehaviour as a key concern during the pandemic. Prevalent types of abuse and harassment experienced are outlined along with employee and management responses to incidents of misbehaviour.

Verbal abuse and sexual harassment from customers are the most prevalent types of misbehaviour either experienced or witnessed by respondents. Customer misbehaviour is commonly thought of as “part of the job” and therefore “not a big deal”. Managers, largely, expect workers to tolerate abusive behaviours from customers and do not take reports of incidents seriously.

Transformational managers need to foster workplace well-being with a focus on physical and psychological safety. Recognition of the issue and greater support for victims are furthermore required at an industry level and on the policy front.

The research points to an uncomfortable reality in the service economy that needs to be confronted by society. It has, therefore, important implications for key stakeholders in ensuring fair, dignified and safe hospitality workplaces.

Customer misbehaviour is reportedly worsening in times of COVID-19 as demonstrated by this study. Despite rhetoric that abuse and harassment are not tolerated, dismissive attitudes from managers – who expect workers to tolerate abusive behaviour – and employee silence about incidents lead the authors to argue that the failure to acknowledge and address this issue constitutes a form of “social washing” in hospitality.