Fuel the service fire

Drawing from self-determination theory, this study aims to examine the effect of leader humor on frontline hospitality employees’ service performance and proactive customer service performance (PCSP) via harmonious passion (HP) for work with employee neuroticism as the moderating mechanism.,This study controlled for the nested effect and tested all the hypotheses with Mplus 7.0 using a time-lagged three-wave survey of 232 Chinese supervisor–subordinate dyads.,The results indicated that leader humor promotes frontline hospitality employees’ service performance and PCSP by enhancing their HP. Furthermore, neuroticism was shown to strengthen the direct impact of leader humor on employee HP and its indirect impact on employee service performance and employee PCSP through HP.,First, this research contributes to the leader humor literature through exploring its impact on the service performance and PCSP of frontline hospitality employees. Second, this research develops a new framework to explain the leader humor-employee service outcomes relationship using self-determination theory. Finally, the focus on the moderating role of neuroticism helps to explain the “when” question of leader humor.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management

• Publication date

  2020-04-16

• Fields of study

  Business, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1108/ijchm-06-2019-0534
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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