Prosocial behaviors such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and customer-oriented citizenship behavior (CCB) are the social currency in socialization process, especially in the service encounter context. However, less is known about how OCB and CCB influence employee performance and the intervening role of trait-related moderators (i.e. empathy and mindfulness). Premised upon socialization process, altruistic motivation and self-determination theory, we propose a moderated mediation model that integrates OCB, CCB, empathy, mindfulness, and employee performance. We find that OCB positively affects employee performance through CCB. We also find that the effect of OCB on CCB and, ultimately, on employee performance is stronger for high levels of empathy and mindfulness compared to low levels. We discuss the implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Introduction

Service has become a dominant player in many developed and emerging economies, with many of which relying on services for more than 70% of their gross domestic product (Ostrom et al., 2008; Lemon, 2010; Maiti, 2018). Marketing practitioners in service firms are increasingly required to “raise the bar” in the provision of service to achieve high levels of employee performance (Bell and Menguc, 2002; Schneider et al., 2005; Chan et al., 2010; Fu et al., 2019). To this end, service firms have recently encouraged frontline employees to practice extra-role behaviors that are congruent with their personal traits. Extrarole behavior refers to the informal and voluntary behavior not included as part of an employee’s official job duties but might affect the well-being of the organization and its employees (Bettencourt and Brown, 1997; Bettencourt et al., 2001; Schneider et al., 2005). Organizations often benefit from their employees who are willing to go above and beyond the call of duty (Hart et al., 2016). Two primary forms of extra-role behavior of frontline employees include organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) (Smith et al., 1983; Organ, 1988) and customer-oriented citizenship behavior (CCB) (Netemeyer et al., 2005; Auh et al., 2014). Empathy and mindfulness are essential personal traits that have received considerable attention in clinical and psychology literature (e.g., Wieseke et al., 2012; Brown and Ryan, 2003; Halpern, 2003; Bishop et al., 2004; Hayes and Feldman, 2004). These personal traits of frontline employees, who are often in contact with customers in service firms, may complementarily intervene the way they interact with customers (Ye et al., 2007).