Is insomnia detrimental to proactive service performance and customer-directed helping? Mediation of employee resilience and moderation of job crafting

Abstract

Despite the increasing severity of stressors in the service sector, little research has explored the impact of insomnia among frontline service employees (FSEs) on their service behavior, let alone the long-term consequences of insomnia. To fill this gap, this study aims to examine the mediating relationship between FSEs' insomnia, employee resilience, proactive service performance, and customer-directed helping while also exploring how job crafting moderates these relationships. To investigate the long-term effects of insomnia, we collected three-wave data from 318 FSEs in diverse service sectors over six months. The results of our mediation analyses demonstrated that FSEs’ insomnia negatively affected proactive service performance and customer-directed helping six months later by decreasing their resilience. Our findings further indicated that job crafting significantly attenuated the adverse effects of insomnia on employee resilience. In addition, our moderated mediation analyses revealed that insomnia negatively affected proactive service performance and customer-directed helping through employee resilience among FSEs engaged in a low or moderate level of job crafting. This negative effect was not observed among FSEs who engaged in high levels of job crafting, suggesting a buffering role of job crafting. These findings enrich the service literature and provide valuable insights and contributions to the field.