Abstract
Frontline service employees, especially in service industry, are the first touch-point while facing customers. The service they offered will directly impact on the customers’ satisfaction. Given the fast changing environment, it is necessary for every firm to find their unique competitive advantage. Employee creativity is one of the important factors for service firms to succeed. In this study, we explore the main and interactive effects of work contextual factors from the job demand-control-support model, along with other key factors such as task autonomy, task significance and workplace fun, on the creativity of frontline service employees. Data for this research are drawn from the 2015 “Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS)” and used several criteria to filter our target sample, 375 frontline service employees from service industry. The study results show that the task autonomy has not only a main impact but also the interactive effect with interpersonal relationship to affect employee creativity. Employees with higher interpersonal relationship quality tend to be less creative in their job performance when the task autonomy is low. These findings may have implications for researchers and provide different insights for service organizations.