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Purpose Big data analytics (BDA) helps service providers with customer insights and competitive information. It also empowers customers with insights about the relative merits of competing services. The purpose of this paper is to address the research question, “How does big data analytics enable frontline employees (FLEs) in effective service delivery?” Design/methodology/approach The research develops schemas to visualise service contexts that potentially benefit from BDA, based on the literature drawn from BDA and FLEs streams. Findings The business drivers for BDA and its level of maturity vary across firms. The primary thrust for BDA is to gain customer insights, resource optimisation and efficient operations. Innovative FLEs operating in knowledge intensive and customisable settings may realise greater value co-creation. Practical implications There exists a considerable knowledge gap in enabling the FLEs with BDA tools. Managers need to train, orient and empower FLEs to collaborate and create value with customer interactions. Service-dominant logic posits that skill asymmetry is the reason for service. So, providers need to enhance skill levels of FLEs continually. Providers also need to focus on market sensing and customer linking abilities of FLEs. Social implications Both firms and customers need to be aware of privacy and ethical concerns associated with BDA. Originality/value Knitting the BDA and FLEs research streams, the paper analyses the impact of BDA on service. The research by developing service typology portrays its interplay with the typologies of FLEs and BDA. The framework portrays the service contexts in which BD has major impact. Looking further into the future, the discussion raises prominent questions for the discipline.

Purpose - This paper examines simultaneously mediating mechanisms through which servant leadership (SL) affects employee creativity (EC). Specifically, the authors test harmonious passion (HP) and psychological safety (PS) as the mediating paths through which servant leadership predicts employee creativity. Design/Methodology/Approach - Data were collected from 274 employees in seven four- and five-star hotels in Indonesia. A partial least squares structural equation modelling technique was used to estimate the measurement and structural models. Findings -The findings of this study indicate that managers should adopt servant leadership behaviors, which can improve employees’ psychological resources, such as harmonious creativity, passion, and psychological safety. Originality of the research - This study offers original insights into the emerging body of hospitality literature by presenting the initial empirical proof of the combined impact of harmonious passion and psychological safety in facilitating the influence of servant leadership on frontline employees’ creativity.

•Organizational identification enhances retail frontline employee job performance.•Jobs characterized as meaningful enhance retail frontline employees’ performance.•Performance effects of organizational identification are reduced when retail jobs are meaningful. Organizational identification (OI) – which is defined as a sense of oneness with the organization – has consistently been found to increase frontline employee (FLE) job performance. However, whether these performance gains are uniform across different types of frontline jobs (e.g., retail clerks vs. financial advisors) and performance outcomes (e.g., behavioral vs. financial) has yet to be determined. Consequently, frontline managers lack the guidance necessary to decide whether or when they should prioritize investments in OI as a mechanism for achieving organizational performance goals. We begin to redress this knowledge gap through a meta-analytic investigation of the OI-FLE performance relationship, which reveals: (a) an overall positive effect of OI on FLE job performance, (b) job meaningfulness (i.e., job autonomy, skill variety and task significance) weakens the OI-FLE job performance relationship, and (c) this weakening is more pronounced in the case of behavioral and customer (but not financial) performance outcomes. Our study findings thus suggest retail managers should prioritize investments in OI when their goal is to promote desirable FLE behaviors and in situations where the work cannot be made meaningful due to job design constraints (e.g., when providing FLEs autonomy is not possible because the work must be performed in a prespecified manner at a predetermined time). [Display omitted]

Interpersonal exchanges between customers and frontline service employees increasingly involve the use of technology, such as point-of-sale terminals, tablets, and kiosks. The present research draws on role and script theories to demonstrate that customer reactions to technology-infused service exchanges depend on the presence of employee rapport. When rapport is present during the exchange, the use of technology functions as an interpersonal barrier preventing the customer from responding in kind to employee rapport-building efforts, thereby decreasing service encounter evaluations. However, during service encounters in which employees are not engaging in rapport building, technology functions as an interpersonal barrier, enabling customers to retreat from the relatively unpleasant service interaction, thereby increasing service encounter evaluations. Two analyses using J.D. Power Guest Satisfaction Index data support the barrier and beneficial effects of technology use during service encounters with and without rapport, respectively. A follow-up experiment replicates this data pattern and identifies psychological discomfort as a key process that governs the effect. For managers, the results demonstrate the inherent incompatibility of initiatives designed to encourage employee–customer rapport with those that introduce technology into frontline service exchanges.

Marketing relationships have evolved from simple dyadic transactions between the firm and its customers into scenarios in which the firm's frontline employees are required to manage a portfolio of stakeholder relationships. The authors begin by characterizing the \"strategic\" frontline employee (SFLE) as a focal marketing employee who, in the execution of his or her work, must influence a variety of stakeholder target groups, including (1) customers, (2) the internal business team, and (3) external business partners. The authors leverage data from SFLEs at two firms to explore the similarities and differences in SFLE influence tactic effectiveness across the three stakeholder groups. They find that the effectiveness of influence tactics in driving performance differs across stakeholder target types and, somewhat surprisingly, that the SFLE's influence of both the internal business team and external business partners has a greater effect on his or her performance than does influence directed at customers. The authors close with a discussion of the implications for theory and practice.

The evolving landscape of physical retailing necessitates a reevaluation of personalization approaches to meet existing market conditions and the demands of modern customers. In this context, the authors explore the interplay between human-enabled and technology-enabled personalization, offering an examination of their characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. The authors deconstruct the personalization process into three distinct stages, namely identification, implementation, and interaction, and discuss potential contingency factors of personalization in the physical retailing context. More so, the authors discuss the future of personalization in physical retailing along the three steps of the defined personalization process. In doing so, the authors lay out a research agenda that can serve as a valuable guide for future studies in this field.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating effect of job embeddedness on the relationships between high-performance work practices, trust in supervisor and turnover intentions of frontline employees in the hospitality industry. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 343 frontline employees working in four- and five-star hotels of Thailand. Partial least squares was used for analysis because it is considered as the best method to analyze the data containing both reflective and formative indicators. Findings Results suggest that job embeddedness fully mediates the effects of high-performance work practices and trust in supervisor on turnover intentions and turnover intention positively affects the actual voluntary turnover. Practical implications The study confirms that high-performance work practices (empowerment, training and rewards) and trust in supervisor affect turnover intentions through on-the-job embeddedness. Hence, high-performance work practices embed hotel employees in their jobs, and they are unlikely to display turnover intentions. Furthermore, low level of trust in supervisor must be addressed to maintain a healthy environment where employees are able to develop their job embeddedness. Originality/value This study contributes to the body of research on the theoretical explanation of the consequences of trust in supervisor in hospitality industry, as well as to the growing body of research on turnover intentions in frontline employees.

This research explores the factors driving frontline employees' (FLEs') organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) when faced with customer incivility, focusing on the role of employee efficacy and the moderating effect of perceived organizational support. The study uses a two-part methodology. First, it uses an experimental design to examine how customer incivility impacts OCB through selfefficacy, moderated by organizational support. Second, it utilizes a survey of 455 airline passengers to investigate the impact of OCB on customer behavioral intentions. Findings reveal that customer incivility negatively affects employee efficacy, but perceived organizational support mitigates this impact, enhancing employees' ability to maintain efficacy under challenging circumstances. Higher employee efficacy fosters OCB, significantly influencing customers' intentions to reuse airline services and share positive word-of-mouth. The study highlights the importance of robust support systems to empower employees to manage difficult customer interactions and promote proactive workplace behaviors. By integrating experimental and survey approaches, this research provides novel insights into the interplay between customer incivility, employee efficacy, organizational support, and customer behavior, contributing to identity control theory (ICT). It underscores the value of organizational strategies in supporting employees, enhancing service quality, and fostering customer loyalty in the airline industry.

From a Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) perspective, employees constitute operant resources that firms can draw to enhance the outcomes of innovation efforts. While research acknowledges that frontline employees (FLEs) constitute, through service encounters, a key interface for the transfer of valuable external knowledge into the firm, the range of potential benefits derived from FLE-driven innovation deserves more investigation. Using a sample of knowledge intensive business services firms (KIBS), this study examines how the collaboration with FLEs along the new service development (NSD) process, namely FLE co-creation, impacts on service innovation performance following two routes of different effects. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) results indicate that FLE co-creation benefits the NS success among FLEs and firm’s customers, the constituents of the resources route. FLE co-creation also has a positive effect on the NSD speed, which in turn enhances the NS quality. NSD speed and NS quality integrate the operational route, which proves to be the most effective path to impact the NS market performance. Accordingly, KIBS managers must value their FLEs as essential partners to achieve successful innovation from an internal and external perspective, and develop the appropriate mechanisms to guarantee their effective involvement along the NSD process.