How insomnia among frontline service employees drives customer-directed counterproductive work behavior: Mediation of ego depletion and moderation of organizational health climate and health-oriented leadership

Abstract

Frontline service employees (FSEs) often experience insomnia because of irregular work schedules, emotional labor, and demanding customer interactions. While previous research has mainly portrayed insomnia as a result of negative service encounters, little is known about whether insomnia itself leads to counterproductive service behavior. Using the conservation of resources theory, this study examined the effect of FSEs’ insomnia on customer-directed counterproductive work behavior (CD-CWB), with ego depletion as a mediating mechanism and organizational health climate (OHC) and health-oriented leadership (HoL) as contextual moderators. Three-wave survey data from 293 full-time FSEs in South Korea showed that insomnia was positively and indirectly related to CD-CWB through ego depletion. Moreover, OHC reduced the positive association between insomnia and ego depletion, making this association weaker when OHC was high. Although HoL did not exert a significant two-way moderating effect, the results indicated a significant three-way interaction: the relationship between insomnia and ego depletion was strongest when both OHC and HoL were low. These findings contribute to the service literature by extending sleep/resource-loss research to a frontline service deviance context and highlighting the buffering role of health-supportive organizational practices.