ESCP Europe

Langue

English

Publication year

01/02/2022

Service adaptive behavior (SAB) is the key to creating a service experience that warrants telling others. This study conducted a survey of 401 luxury hotel personnel and used a qualitative and quantitative approach to explore how empowering leadership encourages boundary-spanning service employees to exhibit adaptive behaviors, and which configurations of organizational and individual factors increase the exhibition of adaptive behaviors. The results show that empowering leadership behaviors influence employees’ SAB through improved perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in relation to their job roles. Among these perceptions, role-identity autonomy and competence stimulate employee creativity and positively influence SAB, whereas error strain weakens the positive effects of employees’ basic psychological needs and creativity on SAB. The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis shows four categories of antecedent configurations that contribute to high-exhibition of SAB. The results have implications in managing service contacts and employee empowerment and training.