Service research and practice reflect a strong consensus that service innovation helps service organisations succeed in a dynamic business environment (e.g. Giannopoulou et al., 2014; Victorino et al., 2005). However, service innovation is not just a result of firms’ strategies and overall access to resources; more fundamentally, it stems from the creativity of frontline service employees (Coelho and Augusto, 2010; Engen and Magnusson, 2015). While doing their job, service employees gain knowledge that can inspire novel and useful ideas, which in turn, when implemented, can become service innovations (Slatten et al., 2011). However, frontline service employees often experience irregular and inflexible work schedules, demanding and difficult customers, heavy workloads and long work hours (e.g. Hon et al., 2013). In order to cope with high job demands, the employees need to engage in self-regulation – the process of bringing themselves into alignment with certain standards and expectations – by using different motivational orientations (Hyosun and Hyehyun, 2015; Zhao and Namasivayam, 2013). It is therefore important to understand frontline employees’ responses to those job demands, and to answer the question of how to motivate frontline service employees’ creativity when they have to cope with high job demands through self-regulation. Because service employee creativity provides the foundation for service firms’ innovations (Engen and Magnusson, 2015; Sigala and Kyriakidou, 2015), an examination of the effects that service employees’ motivational orientations in self-regulation have on their creativity will engender a more fundamental understanding of how to enhance creativity and innovation in the service industry.