More Active When You’re Having Fun? The Effect Of Leisure Participation On Frontline Employees’ Proactive Service Behavior

With the increasingly fierce competition in the service industry and the gradual increase of diversified customer requirements,it is difficult for front-line employees to meet customer needs by just completing their own work in the service process,and they need to implement additional spontaneous,proactive and sustainable service behaviors in order to achieve a high level of customer perception of service quality.However,proactive service behavior requires more energy from employees,and its implementation is closely related to the amount of resources employees have.In the context of the current long working hours system implemented by most service companies,employees are subjected to excessive workload and work pressure due to the extended working hours,and are thus deeply depleted of resources,making it difficult to achieve high work performance.At this time,what service companies urgently need is to increase employee resources to promote their customer service initiative behavior in terms of quantity and quality.As an important way to restore individual resources,leisure participation can help employees relax,acquire skills and improve self-confidence,and increase their willingness to proactive service behavior by restoring and increasing the resources held by employees.However,most existing studies have focused on the factors influencing customer service initiative from an internal organizational perspective,and there is a lack of external factors such as leisure during non-working hours,especially the cross-scenario analysis of "work-nonwork".In this paper,a questionnaire survey was conducted at multiple time points to collect data from frontline service employees,and the impact of non-work leisure participation on employees’ customer service initiative behavior during working hours was investigated from the perspective of Conservation of Resources Theory and Effort-Recovery Model.The study was analyzed in two stages.Firstly,the correspondence between three types of leisure participation,namely,non-work time casual leisure,project-based leisure and serious leisure,and four dimensions of recovery experience,psychological detachment,relaxation experience,control experience and mastery experience,was explored among frontline employees.The conclusions are as follows.(1)Employees get stronger control experience when they engage in casual leisure.(2)Employees get stronger relaxation experience when they engage in project-based leisure.(3)Employees get stronger psychological detachment and mastery experience when they engage in serious leisure.Secondly,the role of recovery experience obtained due to leisure on frontline service-oriented employees’ proactive customer service performance was further explored,and the mechanism of action and heterogeneous conditions were investigated in depth with emotional recovery as a mediator and work stress as a moderator.The conclusions are as follows.(1)The control experience and mastery experience of front-line service employees positively contribute to their positive emotional recovery,and the relaxation experience and psychological detachment positively contribute to their negative emotional recovery.(2)The positive emotional recovery and negative emotional recovery of front-line service employees positively mediate the relationship between their recovery experience and customer service proactive behavior.(3)Work pressure plays a positive regulatory role in the relationship between the recovery experience and emotion recovery of frontline service employees in some dimensions.The above findings indicate the positive influence of leisure activities performed by employees during non-working hours on their customer service initiative behavior during working hours and the underlying mechanism of action.This study complements the research on employees’ proactive service behavior from the perspective of employees’ leisure participation in their spare time,which is external to the organization,and provides corresponding suggestions for service companies to improve employees’ performance and achieve long-term development.The innovation of this study is mainly reflected in the following three aspects.(1)In terms of research questions and contents,this paper starts from the cross-scenario role of leisure "non-work-work" and clarifies the influence mechanism of leisure participation in non-work time on employees’ customer service initiative.(2)In terms of research methods and data,a dynamic survey with multiple time points was used to collect data on employees’ pre and post leisure participation status,and relevant quantitative analysis was conducted.(3)In terms of research variables and mechanisms,this paper refines the correspondence between the three types of leisure participation and the four dimensions of recovery experience,and explains the impact of recovery experience on job performance from the perspective of emotional recovery.