Serving the customer, serving the family, and serving the employee: toward a comprehensive understanding of the effects of service-oriented high-performance work systems

Abstract

Accompanying the rise of the service economy, service-oriented high-performance work systems (SHPWS) have received increasing attention in HR research. However, existing research has predominately focused on the “bright side” of this system by highlighting its benefits to customer service outcomes as organizations hope and expect, while paying less attention to its potential costs to service employees. Using a “triple-service” perspective, this study examines how SHPWS is related to employees’ customer service as well as their service to their families and to themselves. Drawing on the job demands-resources model, we propose an integrated model in which SHPWS has both beneficial and detrimental effects on service outcomes through two opposing pathways: by providing job resources (i.e. customer orientation) and by producing job demands (i.e. service workload). The structural equation modeling analyses of a two-wave, six-week time-lagged survey data set from 222 hotel frontline service employees supported all of our hypotheses. Although SHPWS can benefit employees’ serving their customers (i.e. high service performance) by enhancing their customer orientation, it can also cause harm to employees’ serving themselves (i.e. adverse health condition) via imposing a heavy service workload. Meanwhile, SHPWS has mixed effects on employees’ serving their families (i.e. work-to-family interface) via customer orientation and service workload. These findings suggest that SHPWS works as a double-edged sword which has both bright side and dark side effects, depending on the underlying processes and the outcomes considered.