While frontline service employees (i.e. customer-contact employees) are widely considered crucial to the performance of many service firms (e.g. Chase, 1978; Kao and Chen, 2016), the management of such employees is likely more challenging than that of their counterparts in manufacturing firms. For instance, such employees have to regularly learn uncertain customer needs and then customize their service delivery process (see, e.g. Yee et al., 2013). They are expected to offer inputs to the new service development (NSD) process because of their hands-on knowledge about customers (e.g. needs, communication styles) (Lages and Piercy, 2012). When service failures occur, they need to implement various service recovery actions such as solution implementation (Michel et al., 2009). While these challenging duties are unlikely performed by operational employees in manufacturing companies, they are common for service employees and critical to the performance of their firms. To discharge such duties effectively, customer-contact employees need to be good at learning (e.g. learning customer needs, learning new service processes) and to possess a positive attitude toward challenges (e.g. problem solving in NSD and service recoveries). Nonetheless, the literature pertinent to the management of service employee offers very limited insights on specific ways to motivate service employees to learn effectively and be positive toward challenges in their dynamic frontline service environments. In this research, we identify learning goal orientation (LGO) as a relevant concept to plug this gap in the literature. The literature on management generally refers to goal orientation as an individual’s disposition toward developing or demonstrating competence in achievement situations (VandeWalle, 1997). LGO is a specific form of goal orientation regarding an individual’s disposition toward developing competence by obtaining new skills and mastering new situations (DeShon and Gillespie, 2005), and is closely associated with the individual’s performance in discharging challenging duties (VandeWalle, 1997; VandeWalle et al., 2001). Therefore, service employees with high levels of LGO are good at learning new skills and processes (e.g. new service delivery processes), as well as capable of performing challenging duties (e.g. service recoveries), thereby achieving superior performance in their jobs and meeting business goals for their firms. Within the literature, Tucker et al. studied several forms of learning, including learning from failures (e.g. Tucker and Edmondson, 2003), organizational learning (e.g. Tucker et al., 2007), and deliberate learning (e.g. Nembhard and Tucker, 2011).