Purpose: The study aims to examine the role of initiative climate as a resource caravan passageway in engaging employees and developing a proactive frontline service workforce to identify the mechanisms whereby scarce resources efficiently yielding the desired outcomes can help organizations improve productivity and gain competitive advantage, thereby helping clarify the leadership–performance relationship in service organizations.Design/methodology/approach: The study employed a quantitative research design with a cross-sectional survey conducted among frontline hospitality employees in Malaysia. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to examine the hypothesized relationships.Findings: The initiative climate is significant as a resource caravan passageway to transmit the positive impact of interpersonal leadership onto the engagement and proactive performance of frontline hospitality employees in whom initiative climate and employee engagement sequentially mediated the relationship between interpersonal leadership and proactive service performance.Research limitations/implications: The online data collection procedure conducted through LinkedIn and Facebook and cross-sectional, self-reported survey method are significant limitations of the current study.Practical implications: The findings of the study will aid in developing organizational interventions for an engaged and proactive frontline service workforce, as interpersonal leadership can positively impact the engagement and proactive behavior of frontline service employees via initiative climate. Therefore, hospitality managers should value interpersonal leadership and initiative climate as coexisting organizational resources.Originality/value: The study shows the significance of initiative climate in the relationships between interpersonal leadership, employee engagement and the proactive performance of frontline service employees.

While previous research has improved our knowledge of how leadership influences employee behavior, the role of potential processes and contingencies in this relationship remains relatively unexplored. In the current study, based on the Self-determination Theory (SDT), we intend to contribute to this research by investigating whether employee engagement significantly plays the role of an intervening mechanism between employees’ perceived interpersonal leadership of their supervisor and proactive service performance. Moreover, positive emotional labor (i.e., deep acting) is tested as a moderator to understand whether or not the strength of the relationship between employee engagement and employee proactivity is more for those who show more deep acting. Results of an online survey study among 438 frontline hospitality employees in Malaysia revealed that while employee engagement is a significant mediator in the relationship between interpersonal leadership and proactive service performance, positive emotional labor moderates the relationship between employee engagement and proactive service performance. Therefore, the findings of the current study provide initial evidence about how and for whom positive interpersonal leadership employee perceptions promote employee proactivity of frontline hospitality employees. Implications of the findings for the practice and research are discussed.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to determine the relationship between personal mastery orientation and employee creativity through internalized extrinsic motivation (identified regulation) and intrinsic motivation while testing job complexity as a boundary condition.Design/methodology/approach: The authors tested this study model using a cross-sectional design with a sample of (N = 361). The study population was software developers from across different cities of Pakistan. Respondents were asked to rate themselves on creative behavior. Partial least square structural equation (PLS-SEM) and PROCESS macro were used for data analysis.Findings: The results of the study confirm that personal mastery orientation positively affects employee creativity. Furthermore, both identified regulation and intrinsic motivation mediate the relationship between personal mastery and employee creativity. Job complexity was shown to moderate the direct relationship between personal mastery, identified regulation and intrinsic motivation such that for higher job complexity levels, the relationship between personal mastery and both types of motivation (identified and intrinsic) becomes stronger. The authors confirm that the indirect relationship between personal mastery and employee creativity through identified regulation was contingent upon job complexity level. In comparison, the indirect relationship between personal mastery and employee creativity through intrinsic motivation is not contingent upon the level of job complexity.Research limitations/implications: There are a few limitations to the authors' study. The current study is based on a cross-sectional design; therefore, this is of limited causal value. The authors suggest the studies examining similar relations to this study model use a longitudinal design. The incumbent of the job reports creative behavior; therefore, this is susceptible to common method bias (CMB). A peer-reported or supervisor-reported creative behavior should be used to eliminate the CMB in future studies.Practical implications: The authors' study provides valuable input in identifying the complex mechanism through which creative behavior is induced involving individual personality disposition, job attributes and various types of motivations. In this study, the authors tried to reveal the mechanism through which personal mastery orientation predicts creative behavior. In the authors' endeavor of testing the motivational paths through which personal mastery orientation predicts creative behavior, the authors confirmed the efficacy of autonomous-complex motivation based on the self-determination framework. The authors' findings add to the evidence of the importance of intrinsic motivation in inducing creative behavior and recommend that the researcher should not ignore intrinsic motivation when exploring the effectiveness of extrinsic motivation.Originality/value: The study's findings strengthen the argument of the continuum-like structure of the motivation types under self-determination theory(SDT). The authors argued that intrinsic motivation is a relatively stable type of motivation when creative behavior is involved and is not contingent upon the job attributes. These findings add to the evidence that intrinsic motivation is stable compared to extrinsic motivation. Another important contribution of this study is that the authors identified a boundary condition for the internalized extrinsic motivation when serving as creativity predicting mechanism and ruled the presence of a conditional effect when intrinsic motivation is involved.

Purpose: Though employee job engagement has been one of the few most proliferated organizational concepts during the last two decades, evidence on how to achieve an engaged workforce is unclear. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the engagement literature by investigating the role of interpersonal leadership in developing job engagement through the relative importance of deep acting emotional labor skills, initiative climate and learning goal orientation as intervening mechanisms.Design/methodology/approach: This study employed an online self-reported survey in data collection, gathering input from 438 frontline service employees in Malaysia. The data was then tested using the structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the proposed parallel mediation model of the study.Findings: The findings demonstrated that deep acting emotional labor skills, initiative climate and learning goal orientation were significantly effective in intervening mechanisms through which interpersonal leadership impacted job engagement.Practical implications: This study offers insightful evidence that can be utilized by service organizations to improve employees' job engagement. The evidence derived from this study suggests that interpersonal leadership is a valuable organizational resource that can help carve pathways through which the objective of employee job engagement can be achieved. Therefore, while crafting organizational interventions for employee job engagement, service managers should address the findings of this study.Originality/value: Despite the evidence presented in previous literature on the notable relationship between leadership and engagement, there is yet to be an apt understanding of the impact of new leadership perspectives and the intervening mechanisms in predicting job engagement. This study attempts to fill the research gap.