Hospitality employees’ affective experience of shame, self-efficacy beliefs and job behaviors: The alleviating role of error tolerance

Service management researchers have clearly demonstrated that customers experience various emotions in service failure situations. In comparison, hospitality employees’ emotional experiences in such situations, are relatively unknown, as they are often required to hide experienced emotions and express emotions in ways consistent with industry standards. To address this gap, we examine the typical emotional experience of shame in the wake of service failure and explain how it influences employees’ job behaviors—service recovery performance and organizational citizenship behavior—via self-efficacy beliefs. Furthermore, we draw on social information processing to introduce error tolerance as a social persuasion buffer that mitigates the negative effects of shame on self-efficacy perceptions. Survey data collected from 217 subordinate-supervisor dyads employed in restaurant settings reveal that shame experienced weakened employees’ self-efficacy beliefs, and these weakened beliefs were in turn negatively associated with job behaviors. Finally, error tolerance significantly moderated the relationship between shame and self-efficacy.