INTRODUCTION
Mindfulness received increasing attention in clinical, identity, and, most importantly, psychological topics in organizational and industrial settings (Wang et al., 2021), except for the service sector (Li et al., 2017) and the hospitality industry (Wang et al., 2021). Hospitality is a dynamic, labour-intensive, and people-oriented industry in which individual factors are vital in influencing organisational function in this industry (Raab & Mayer, 2004). Therefore, mindfulness in the workplace, as a condition in which employees focus on the current condition during working hours (Zivnuska et al., 2016), is often deemed vital for the hospitality industry. Mindfulness also reflects the “receptive attention and the awareness of current events and circumstances” (Brown et al., 2007), positively affecting physical and mental health, psychological (Dane & Brummel, 2013) and personal well-being, and life satisfaction (Ivtzan & Lomas, 2016).
Further, Wang et al. (2021) argued that the working environment could interact with mindfulness and affect employee creativity at work. Mindful information processing allows a person to understand customers’ needs better and brings the opportunity to conduct discretion for services through a creative solution (Hales & Chakravorty, 2016) which should be considered a form of creativity that is increasingly vital for the hospitality industry (Wang et al., 2021). Thus, the importance of mindfulness in the hospitality industry is highlighted because it enables individuals to organize their cognitive resources better and optimize their focus in handling goal-oriented tasks (Kozasa et al., 2012).
If we look deeper, employee creativity will determine customer satisfaction, especially in service products, where creativity and initiative are crucial in improving customer satisfaction. Although service delivery consists of employees providing services for customers, the latter usually is not deeply involved in the service production process or suggests solutions and only acts as a service recipient. Therefore, they usually wait for employees to provide the service, expecting satisfying results when they encounter a problem (Dong et al., 2015). Thus, employee creativity is vital in creating customer satisfaction by providing positive emotional experiences for customers (Wang et al., 2021), which underlines its importance in service sectors.
Customer behaviour, particularly negative behaviour in the form of customer incivility, could affect service sector employees. Customer incivility refers to a customer’s behaviours that delineate and holds a low intensity on an employee with an ambiguous intention to hurt the said employee (Sliter et al., 2010). The main adverse impact of customer incivility in the hospitality industry is declining productivity and service performance because of its direct influence on profitability (Cho et al., 2016; Sliter et al., 2010). Employees who received poor treatment might be perceived as providing excellent services beyond essential requirements as unnecessary (Jang et al., 2020). In other words, customer incivility will reduce employees’ willingness to perform proactive service performance.
Proactive service performance reflects individual behaviour that exceeds the explicit performance requirement (Rank et al., 2007), while customer incivility acts as a stressor that drains employees’ resources (Kern & Grandey, 2009). Thus, responding to uncivilized customers could reduce employees’ proactive service performance achievement to minimize loss of resources (Jang et al., 2020) because holding proactive service performance is a viable option for employees who attend to such customers in delivering services.
Tricky service delivery for customers combined with customer incivility issues will rapidly deplete employees’ mental and physical resources, which will cause exhaustion, decrease their work well-being, and affect their work engagement. Jang et al. (2020) suggested that customer incivility could affect employees’ work engagement by increasing demands from a job that causes emotional exhaustion and psychological distress. Secondly, individuals will experience stress in the workplace due to unbalance between generated benefits and loss of resources. As a result, employees will perceive it as a burden on their resources during a stressful time and reduce their dedication with sole purpose of conserving the remaining energy.
After considering the paramount relationships and effect of the said factors, the current study examines mindfulness’ effect on employee creativity and work engagement, which will affect proactive service performance and customer satisfaction. The current study also examines how customer incivility affects work engagement and proactive service performance. Generally speaking, this study developed a comprehensive model that tests how and in what condition mindfulness affects employees’ behaviour and performance and how these outcomes affect customer incivility. Thus, this study focuses on the effect of mindfulness on employees’ creativity, which in turn determines customer satisfaction and proactive service performance since the question of to which extent mindfulness affects these outcomes has not been examined extensively (Wang et al., 2021). Additionally, this study also examines how customer incivility affects proactive service performance through the mediating role of work engagement. Increasing attention to mindfulness is vital for workplaces that rely on customer service and will assist employees in facing customer incivility.
LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT
Mindfulness
The increasing researcher’s attention toward mindfulness has opened the opportunity for its construct conceptualization (Wang et al., 2021), resulting in the definition of mindfulness as a person’s attuned attention to the event and conditions surrounding them (Brown et al., 2007) or a condition in which a person consciously understands their surroundings (Stankov et al., 2020, Wang et al., 2021). In personal and individual context, mindfulness also refers to the variations of awareness (Brown & Ryan, 2003; Bishop et al., 2004; Dane, 2011). The essential point to note is the top-down mechanism in mindfulness, where a person actively and deliberately pays attention to their environment, followed by actively storing and recalling the information. As a result, the person will be constantly focused on objective-related objects, and their mind does not wander away easily (Wang et al., 2021).
Mindfulness can be achieved when a person focuses on the current condition instead of the future or the past and develops realistic awareness of their senses, feelings, and thoughts (inner experiences) and social and physical environment (external events) (Jang et al., 2020). Lastly, the person must conduct thorough observation using their full awareness and attention without personal assessment and evaluation (Brown et al., 2007; Glomb et al., 2011). Mindfulness benefits physical, mental, and general psychological well-being (Dane & Brummel, 2013) and involves active and continuous evaluation of one’s mental condition compared to one’s healthy and ideal condition (Wang et al., 2021). Mindfulness plays a vital role in maintaining one’s cognitive flexibility and vigilance (Dane & Brummel, 2013), preventing a person from physical threats while improving their overall performance (Moore & Malinowski, 2009).
Mindfulness, Creativity, Proactive Service Performance, and Customer Satisfaction
Mindfulness reflects the ability to be fully present and be aware of one’s position and what are doing without being overly reactive or overwhelmed by the current conditions (Henriksen et al., 2020). Mindfulness is a favourable condition often connected to creativity (Wang et al., 2021) and the coping mechanism for modern problems (Stankov et al., 2020). In comparison, employee creativity is a unique phenomenon often defined as all ideas and actions that exceed the job standards and procedures in providing better production or service delivery (Hon & Lui, 2016; Lai et al., 2014). Mindfulness has positively affected creativity and
customer satisfaction (Wang et al., 2021). Carson (2003) found that mindfulness results in high focus and extensive attention required to improve creativity. In the green business context, green mindfulness of front office employees also positively affects their green business creativity in Pakistan (Kalyar et al., 2021). However, despite the extensive finding on mindfulness effect on employee creativity, it is necessary to acknowledge several studies’ findings that more substantial factors besides mindfulness affect employees’ creativity (Thanh Le et al., 2022). Thus, the connection between the two has not been strongly established (Gip et al., 2022). Nevertheless, mindfulness was a vital concept, since it was negatively correlated to insight problem-solving (Schooler et al., 2014) and creative solution, despite limitedly from the analytical creative process. Hence, this study proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1. Mindfulness positively affects creativity
In addition to its impact on creativity, mindfulness was also found to affect performance. Mindful employees are self-determined, less defensive, shows their reactions cognitively, affectively, conatively, and physiologically toward stimulation at work (Glomb et al., 2011; Jimenez et al., 2010). In workplace setting, mindfulness significantly affects tasks performance (Ostafin & Kassman, 2012; Ruedy & Schweitzer, 2010) and directly and significantly affects job performance in a dynamic workplace such as a service business organization (Dane & Brummel, 2013). Moore & Malinowski’s (2009) findings strengthened the evidence that mindfulness prevents distraction and work blunders, improving employees’ job performance, while reducing customer incivility’s detrimental effect on proactive service performance among casino employees (Jang et al., 2020). In a dynamic environment, mindfulness could facilitate performance behaviour marked by an extensive attention span that aligns individuals with a more extensive level of events and stimuli (Dane, 2011). Studies also suggested that mindful employees tend to exhibit better task performance (Dane & Brummel, 2013; Reb et al., 2015). Based on the socio-cognitive perspective on mindfulness, an employee’s attention through continuous sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences tend to result in a positive impact in providing proactive service performance (Pirson et al., 2012). Hamzah et al. (2015) stated that proactive service performance is related to service-oriented performance and can be applied to altruistic methods, such as willingness to help others. Managers are interested in improving proactive service performance because it is crucial to the company’s success (Tian et al., 2019). Thus, the current study proposed that:
Hypothesis 2. Mindfulness positively affects proactive service performance
The vital role of mindfulness is often connected to customer satisfaction, as Dong et al. (2015) noted the importance of a problem-solving-oriented mindset for frontline employees in providing personalized services and offering new solutions to meet unique customers’ needs. Dong et al. (2015) explained further that customers are uninvolved in service delivery and often wait for the frontline officers to deliver the services they sought and expect satisfying solutions when problems occur. The concept of stress and coping perspective lays the groundwork for the mediating role of employee creativity in the relationship between mindfulness and customer satisfaction (Wang et al., 2021). Today frontline employees in the hospitality industry experience diverse stressors, starting from technology adoption, high customer expectations, organizational challenges, and the demand to maintain people-oriented characteristics while achieving customer satisfaction, to mention a few (Nasifoglu Elidemir et al., 2020). This is where mindfulness plays its role in reducing job stress and promoting health benefits because employees that adopt emotion-focused and problem-solving approach will be able to handle stress from the demand to achieve customer satisfaction at work. Thus, it aligns with the behaviour theory, particularly the transactional model for coping mechanism and self-regulation of stress (Wang et al., 2021). Thus, the hypotheses were proposed:
Hypothesis 3. Mindfulness positively affects customer satisfaction
Hypothesis 4. Employee creativity mediates the effect of mindfulness on customer satisfaction
Customer Incivility, Work Engagement, and Proactive Service Performance
It is particularly common that employees in service industry are susceptible to customer incivility during the service delivery that could appear as a behaviour that delineates and has low intensity toward employees with a vague intention to hurt employees (Sliter et al., 2010). While careful research deemed customer incivility as trivial among other negative treatment at the workplace, such as aggression and violence, the accumulation of routine mistreatment could lead to a strong source of stress for employees (Jang et al., 2020). Customer incivility could harm employees’ attitudes and behaviour in their jobs; as explained by Hur et al. (2016), employees who experienced customer incivility often adopt surface acting in their job that exhausted their emotional resources. Customer incivility is also a common condition for tourism and hospitality frontline employees that could significantly decrease employees’ psychological resources and customer service quality (Boukis et al., 2020). This phenomenon also negatively affected employee performance outcomes (Hwang et al., 2022).
Rank et al. (2007) explained that although greater attention was provided to proactive behaviour. Lack of research in proactive service performance in the service industry created a gap that could be filled by discussing the relationship between work engagement, customer incivility, and proactive customer behaviour. As a personal initiative construct proactive service performance holds three dimensions self-started, long-term, and persistent (Frese et al., 1996). Firstly, individuals with high proactive service performance are often involved in self-starter behaviour, showing initiative, and providing help without customer requests. Secondly, individuals with high proactive service performance show long-term-oriented (forward-thinking) behaviours, cooperate with their coworkers and anticipate customer demands to build better customer interactions. Thirdly, employees need a persistent behaviour in their line of service to develop proactive service performance. Thus, they need
customer feedback to ensure that their delivery satisfy their customer’s expectations. Unfortunately, customer incivility often affects employee proactive service performance even though it does not affect employee in-role performance (Cheng et al., 2020), leading to the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 5: Customer incivility negatively affects proactive service performance
In addition to its impact on performance, customer incivility also affects work engagement, with previous study proving its negative impact on work engagement and performance (Wang & Chen, 2020). As supported by Kahn (1990) that involved employees invest their resources: cognitive, physical, and emotional for their jobs, unlike the uninvolved employees who are unwilling to do so. Jang et al. (2020) explained that as psychological stress, customer incivility underlines the employee’s involvement through increasing job demands, emotional and psychological exhaustion, and reduce employee enthusiasm and willingness to be involved in them. Secondly, individual experiences stress at the workplace when their face an imbalance between the benefits and resources they lose. An individual with fewer resources tends to be more sensitive toward loss of resources and unable to stay and meet job demands. When employees experience emotional burdens due to customer incivility, they will avoid the loss of further resources by reducing their involvement at work. In turn, this decline will further weaken the proactive service performance as Jang et al. (2020) proposed that work engagement mediates the negative impact of customer incivility on employee proactive service performance. Thus, the following hypotheses were proposed:
Hypothesis 6: Customer incivility negatively affects work engagement Hypothesis 7: Work engagement positively affects proactive service performance
Hypothesis 8: Work engagement mediates the impact of customer incivility on proactive service performance
METHODOLOGY
Sample and Procedure
Two hundred and thirty employees in the hospitality industry in Indonesia was selected using a snowball sampling method and participated in the two months survey. The first contact was developed with respondents willing to be contact persons and recommend other employees to participate in the study. Prospective respondents were informed that the survey will be confidential information and that only collective results would be reported as research findings. Although the survey was mainly focused on star hotels, researchers shared the study questionnaire with all hotel employees spanning from the technical, engineering, food and beverages, and housekeeping staff to the office employees such as the accounting, front office, and even the executive level. Respondents were given a token of appreciation as an incentive for their participants. Of 230 respondents, 52% are males, and 48% are females; most are younger than 40 (72.5%), indicating productive age. Most respondents hold diploma degrees (45.7%) and have worked for less than ten years (81.7%).
Measurements
The required data was collected using questionnaire adopted and modified to the current research context. Wang et al.’ (2021) six items were adopted to measure mindfulness (α = 0.715). Customer incivility was measured using Kim & Qu (2019) five items (α = 0.816). Nine items from Balducci et al. (2010) with a (α = 0.916) were also adopted to measure work engagement. Coelho & Augusto’s (2010) five items measurement was adopted to measure employee creativity (α = 0.643). Rank et al. (2007) used seven items of measurement (α = 0.801) was adopted to measure proactive service performance. Lastly, customer satisfaction measurement was adopted from Wang et al. (2021) consisting of three items measurement (α = 0.861).
RESULTS
The data collected from the survey were analysed for the descriptive statistics measuring the means, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis of the variables before being estimated for their correlation among the variables. The data were then analysed using the PLS method consisting of the measurement model and structural assessments. The results of descriptive statistics summarised in Table 1 show that hospitality industry employees have medium to high creativity, mindfulness, proactive service performance, high work engagement, and customer satisfaction while experiencing low consumer incivility.
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics of Variable
Inter-Variable Correlation
Table 2 summarizes the correlational analysis results showing a significant correlation between employee creativity and mindfulness (0.201, sig 0.002), proactive service performance (0.352, sig 0.000), work engagement (0.468, sig 0.000), and customer satisfaction (0.446, sig 0.000). A similar finding was also observed between customer incivility and mindfulness (-0.460, sig 0.000), proactive service performance (-0.135, sig 0.041), work engagement (-0.258, sig 0.000), and customer satisfaction (-0.195, sig 0.003). Mindfulness, proactive service performance, work engagement, and customer satisfaction are correlated with all other research variables.
Table 2: Inter-Variable Correlation
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
The hypotheses in this study were examined using the SEM PLS method on SmartPLS version 3.3.2. The hypotheses testing on the SmartPLS program consisting of two steps: measurement model and structural model assessment.
Measurement Model Assessment
The first measurement model assessment conducted was the reliability and internal consistency analysis reflected in the Cronbach Alpha coefficient, as summarized in Table 3.
Table 3: Internal Consistency Reliability
The results summarised in the Table show Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of > 0.7, which falls under excellent reliability according to Hair (2013). One variable (employee creativity) generated Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient under 0.7 but still met the minimum criteria and was generated as the optimum results through the item-dropping process. Therefore, all variables generally passed the reliability and internal consistency analysis. The convergent validity analysis was conducted by observing the Indicator Reliability (Outer Loading) and AVE (Average Variance Extracted) scores. According to Hair (2013), the outer loading score shows excellent results when outer loadings > 0.7 and AVE > 0.5. Based on the result of convergent validity analysis using outer loadings is summarized in Table 4, and the AVE score is in Table 3. We dropped several measurement items to generate acceptable outer loading scores, with the remaining items for further analysis summarised in Table 4.
Table 4: Convergent Validity Analysis
The result of convergent validity testing showed outer loading > 0.7 and AVE > 0.5, indicating that all variables and indicators have excellent convergent validity. The last stage in measurement model assessment, discriminant validity, was conducted using the Fornell-Larcker criterion (Hair, 2013) with the highest cross-loading correlation in each variable. The result of this analysis is summarized in Table 5.
Table 5: Discriminant Validity Analysis
Structural Model Evaluation
The second and final step in the SEM PLS hypothesis testing method is to analyse the structural model by examining the direct and indirect relationship between the variables. The generated structural model is provided in Figure 1, and the detail is summarized in Table 5.
Figure 1: Structural Equation Model
Table 6 summarizes the result of the hypothesis analysis using the SEM PLS method. The results support the positive effect of mindfulness on employee creativity with a factor loading of 0.224 and p-value of 0.001 (p<0.05), supporting the first hypothesis. The analysis result also shows the significant positive effect of mindfulness on proactive service performance with a factor loading of 0.119 and p-value of 0.074 (p<0.10) that support the second hypothesis. Mindfulness was also found to significantly and positively affect customer satisfaction with a factor loading of 0.241 and p-value of 0.000 (p<0.05), supporting hypothesis 3.
Table 6: Hypothesis Testing
Notes: * significant at 5%, ** significant at 10%
In addition to the impact of mindfulness, the current study also examined customer incivility’s impact on several work-related outcomes. The analysis shows that customer incivility does not affect proactive service performance, with a p-value of 0.414 (p>0.05). Thus, it does not support hypothesis 5. Supports were found for the remaining hypotheses. Hypothesis 6 on the negative effect of customer incivility on work engagement was supported with a factor loading of -0.267 and a p-value of
0.000 (p<0.05). Hypothesis 7 was also supported with a factor loading of 0.411 and a p-value of 0.000 (p<0.05), supporting the positive impact of work engagement on proactive service behaviour. The hypothesized mediating effect was examined using the indirect effect relationship. Findings support hypothesis 4, employee creativity mediates the relationship between mindfulness and customer satisfaction, with a p-value of 0.006 (p<0.05). The last support was provided on the mediating role of work engagement on the relationship between customer incivility and proactive service performance with a p-value of 0.001 (p<0.05), supporting hypothesis 8.
This study uses 5% and 10% confidence intervals. According to Dahiru (2008), the p <0.05 threshold value is arbitrary and is Fisher’s criteria that determine a p-value of 0.05 as the measure of evidence against a null effect. Researchers could determine a less strict “significant test” by moving the threshold value to 0.10 (10%). Further, Dahiru (2008) explained that a confidence interval for the main results is required, in which 90% is acceptable. Confidence interval interpretation should focus on the implication of the selected value range.
Discussion
This study examined employee mindfulness in a dynamic workplace and examines how mindfulness affects work engagement and employee creativity, which determines employee proactive service performance and customer satisfaction. The model proposed in this study considered the increasing phenomenon of customer incivility. The findings show the effect of mindfulness on employee creativity. Therefore, employees who optimize their mindfulness can improve their creativity at work. This finding strengthens previous empirical findings on mindfulness’ role in strengthening creativity (Zheng & Liu, 2017). Wang et al. (2021) emphasized that mindfulness could foster creativity by allowing a person to step back from scatter-brained and develop more coherence thoughts. Aligning with this notion, Carson (2003) stated that mindfulness provides high focus and extensive attention needed to improve creativity.
This study also confirmed that mindfulness positively affects proactive service performance. Mindful employees will tend to improve their performance in delivering service proactively. This finding aligns with Moore & Malinowski’s (2009) study, which found that mindfulness could improve performance equality, and strengthens Dane & Brummel (2013) finding that mindfulness significantly and directly affects task performance in dynamic workplaces such as service providers.
Mindfulness was also found to positively affects customer satisfaction. Mindful employees will be able to generate customer satisfaction in delivering their services, supporting Dong et al. (2015), who found that employees need to adopt a problem- solving paradigm to deliver personalized services and offer personalized new solutions for customers’ specific needs.
Another finding on the relationship between mindfulness, creativity, and customer satisfaction in the current study is proposed in the mediating role of creativity in the relationship, with a partial mediating effect. This finding indicates that mindfulness could directly affect customer satisfaction and indirectly affect it through creativity. Thus, employees who can optimize their mindfulness will be able to improve their creativity and generate customer satisfaction through their creativity.
Proactive service performance as a critical outcome in the hospitality industry is vulnerable and might show a declining trend due to customer incivility, as found in the current study. This study found that customer incivility affects proactive service performance negatively, meaning that employees experiencing customer incivility will experience declining proactive service performance. This finding strengthens previous studies’ findings (e.g., Cho et al., 2016; Sliter et al., 2010) that the main issue regarding customer incivility in the hospitality industry is declining productivity and performance because it affects overall
profitability directly. Jang et al. (2020) argued that service organizations might not be able to promote proactive services consistently. Employees whose emotional resources were depleted due to customer incivility tend to be less involved in proactive service performance.
This study confirms that customer incivility negatively affects work engagement, showing that a customer’s deviant behaviour could decrease employee work engagement. Customer defiant behaviours could make employees reluctant to be involved in their job because job resources like autonomy and employee’s personal resources like self-efficacy play a vital role in developing employee’s work engagement, align with the JD-R model developed by (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008). Thus, chronic job demands will exhaust employee’s energy and drain their mental and physical resources, leading to exhaustion and job well- being problems. In this context, customer incivility can act as a psychological stressor for employees that exhaust their energy and decrease their work engagement.
This study also confirms the mediating role of work engagement mediates in the relationship between customer incivility and proactive service performance. This finding indicates that employees experiencing customer incivility and declining work engagement will affect their proactive service performance, although customer incivility does not significantly and directly affect proactive service performance. Thus, emphasizing the mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between customer incivility and proactive service performance. This finding aligns with Jang et al. (2020), who found that customer incivility negatively relates to proactive service performance through work engagement. Likewise, the current study strengthens Judge et al.’s (1997) argument that personal resources could mediate the relationship between work environment and work results/outcomes.
THE IMPLICATION OF THE STUDY
Theoretical Implications
This study contribution to the HRM literature is, first, identifying the mediating role of employee creativity in the relationship between mindfulness and customer satisfaction. Although to this day many studies have examined mindfulness’ effect on various job-related outcomes, including customer satisfaction, more empirical support is needed to understand how mindfulness increases customer satisfaction through potential mediators’ role in the relationship. Therefore, this study enriches mindfulness literature through its finding on the role of creativity in mediating the relationship between mindfulness and work outcomes.
In addition to its contribution to be literature, this study also contributes to developing customer incivility literature by answering Schaufeli & Taris’ (2014) call to examine job demands indirect effect on work engagement. This study shows the mediating role of work engagement on the relationship between customer incivility and proactive service performance. In this case, customer incivility is considered a condition that employees can experience as a part of their job demands (Jang et al., 2020), which decreases employee work engagement and affects their unwillingness to demonstrate proactive service performance.
Managerial Implications
This study confirms the importance of employee mindfulness in improving their creativity, service performance, and customer satisfaction. Thus, it is vital for managers to develop employees’ mindfulness. Hülsheger et al. (2013) suggested that specific training, practices, and experiences could assist employees in being more skilful and developing their mindfulness, thus, increasing their focus in carrying out their jobs. Several pieces of training that can be implemented to improve employees’ mindfulness are meditation, which could reduce employees’ stress (Hölzel et al., 2011). Mindfulness-based training is also available for companies to improve employee well-being and other vital outcomes for organizations. Mindfulness training’s key benefits are improving comprehensive mental health and reducing stress. In the hospitality industry, with a dynamic working environment, employees are highly vulnerable to stress. Thus, mindfulness training and practices to improve their mental well- being and health will improve their performance.
In addition to the significance of mindfulness for employees’ personal qualities, managers also need to pay serious attention to the impact of customer incivility, potentially decreasing work engagement and service performance, as supported by this study’s findings. Therefore, managers need to formulate a policy in the workplace that could prevent customer incivility from occurring in their businesses. Managers could communicate company policies during service delivery while respecting customers’ rights. This policy should also emphasize the customer’s responsibility in service delivery processes. Communication with customers on such policies can be conducted through brochures, information boards in the company’s areas, websites, and other means of communication. This communication should also inform customers how they could respond to unsatisfactory services and deliver their protest. Such policies will protect employees from customer incivility during the service delivery process.
CONCLUSION, LIMITATIONS, AND FUTURE RESEARCH
This study aims to examine the effect of mindfulness in its relationship with creativity and work engagement that could improve proactive service performance and customer satisfaction. The study also reveals how customer incivility affects work engagement and proactive service performance. Regardless of the research significance, the current study holds several limitations that should be considered for future research. Firstly, the current study collected data from one time period under a cross-sectional design that might lead to ambiguity in the causal relationships and alternative explanations for the relationship between variables in the study. Thus, future studies should consider longitudinal design to deeper analyse the causal relationship among the variables. Secondly, this study was conducted using a self-report survey, which could generate social desirability bias. Therefore, future studies could apply several different sources, such as measuring work engagement, employee creativity, and proactive service performance from supervisor’s reports and customer satisfaction assessments from the customer. Thirdly, this study is limited to the hospitality industry context, requiring carefulness in interpreting the results in different contexts. Future studies could apply the proposed model to different industries to generalize the result to a more extensive context. Lastly, this study emphasizes the effect of mindfulness on several work-related outcomes, which could be interesting if future studies could explore the factors that act as the antecedents for mindfulness.