Linking customer participation to service employees’ work‐to‐family enrichment: The role of job crafting and OBSE

Abstract

Building on work-home resources model, we develop a conceptual model examining job crafting as the mediator between perceived customer participation and service employees' work-to-family enrichment, and organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) as the moderator on this indirect relationship. Using two-wave survey data collected from hotel service employees, we found that customer participation can enrich employees' family role through increased cognitive and relational job crafting. In addition, employees' OBSE accentuates the positive linkage between customer participation and employees' relational crafting, and subsequently their work-to-family enrichment. This study makes important contributions to extant literature on work-to-family enrichment and job crafting as well. It also carries important implications for organizations to support employees' proactive participation in job crafting and enrich employees' family life. Practitioner pointsOrganizations should well manage customer participation in order to enhance service employees' job crafting. Managers should be aware of how different types of job crafting can enrich their employees' family domain.To cultivate effective work-to-family enrichment, organizations should develop employees' self-worth and sense of competence within the organization.

The Impact of Social Factors on Job Crafting: A Meta-Analysis and Review

“…For instance, for the service industry (e.g., education, tourism, and medical), customers and clients are also important social factors. Loi et al [21] found that customer participation positively related to cognitive and relational job crafting. The reason is that customer participation contributes contextual resources and support to service employees by means of taking up part of employees' work tasks and providing employees with new knowledge and information [53].…”

“…Auh et al [54] found that clients' expertise and advice add value to service delivery in the financial planning context by means of a joint decision-making process. It is expected that these positive processes facilitate how employees view their jobs, to develop personal resources such as becoming more innovative, and enable employees to gain a positive sense of self and meaningfulness [21]. By contrast, if employees encounter increasing needs from clients or customers, these customized needs may increase employees' pressure and workloads, and in turn drain employees' energy [26].…”

“…In our reviewed articles, we only found one article regarding the factor of clients/customers (r = 0.38, Loi et al, 2029 [21]). Due to such little sample size, we did not include this article in our meta-analysis.…”

“…For instance, we found that work-family conflict encourages or discourages job crafting by moderating the relationship between tendencies toward workaholism and expansion and contraction-oriented job crafting [86]. Job crafting is positively related to work-family conflict [73], and work-to-family enrichment [21,42,87]. However, the latter three studies treated family factors as outcomes, thus did not focus on how family factors influence job crafting.…”

“…For example, while some studies showed a positive relationship between transformational leadership and promotion-focused job crafting [17][18][19], others showed a nonsignificant relationship [19,20]. Similarly, Loi et al (2019) [21] indicated a positive relationship between Leader-Member-Exchange (LMX) and job crafting, whereas Radstaak and Hennes (2017) [22] found a negative correlation with increasing structural resources. Overall, the effect of social factors on job crafting looks quite complex and uncertain.…”