Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the influence of individual customer characteristics on frontline employees’ (FLEs) customer need knowledge (CNK), a construct that objectively measures FLEs’ ability to accurately identify a given customer’s hierarchy of needs....

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has, besides the health concerns, caused an unprecedented social and economic crisis that has particularly hit service industries hard. Due to extensive safety measures, many service employees have to work remotely to keep service businesses running. With limited...

Purpose: Frontline service employees (FSEs) face high demands of emotional labor when dealing with difficult, and sometimes even uncivil, customer behavior while attempting to deliver service with a smile. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether employees reciprocate uncivil...

Purpose: Customer sweethearting is a common illicit behavior of frontline employees in service firms. This paper aims to examine the impact of supportive–disloyal leadership behavior on customer sweethearting at different levels of leader–member exchange (LMX) quality....