Can performance pressure hinder service recovery performance? The mediating role of shame and individual contingencies of work meaningfulness and proactivity

Hospitality employees have long been experiencing high pressure at work, due to the strict performance requirements from organizations and excessive socioemotional demands from customers. Although “performing well under pressure” is often considered a prerequisite for competent employees, findings from organizational psychologists regarding employees' responses to perceived performance pressure are divergent. To further elucidate this relationship, drawing upon the social self-preservation theory, this research proposes that performance pressure can elicit frontline employees' emotional experience of shame, which in turn, hampers their service recovery performance. Furthermore, we propose two individual contingencies of work meaningfulness and proactivity that alter employees' reactions to performance pressure. In particular, the experience of shame is more salient when employees perceive lower levels of meaningfulness or possess lower levels of proactivity. A mixed-method approach, involving both scenario-based experiment and multi-wave survey, is adopted. The results support our hypotheses. The findings provide a more holistic understanding of hospitality employees’ responses to performance pressure by uncovering the rarely investigated emotional pathway following performance pressure and identifying two salient individual boundary conditions.