Too little time, too much to do: how time poverty undermines employees’ proactive service behavior

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to examine the relationship between time poverty and hotel employees’ proactive service behavior by identifying future self-continuity as a mediator and competitive climate as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach This research uses a multimethod design to test the hypotheses. Study 1 uses a recall-based experiment with 220 hotel employees to establish causality. Study 2 draws on a two-wave field survey of 298 employees from five hotels in China to enhance ecological validity and test the boundary conditions. Findings The findings reveal that time poverty significantly undermines hotel employees’ proactive service behavior, thereby establishing the mediating role of future self-continuity. Furthermore, competitive climate moderates this effect such that the indirect negative effect becomes stronger when competitive climate is high. Practical implications This study helps hotel managers understand the impact of time poverty on employees and offers practical guidance for monitoring and alleviating it through employee-centered scheduling, workload redistribution and protected time, thereby sustaining employees’ proactive service behavior. Originality/value This study examines hospitality employees’ time poverty by shifting attention from the tourists’ temporal experiences, which have dominated prior research, to employees’ chronic scarcity. Moving beyond the affective and cognitive reactions emphasized in earlier studies, it reveals an identity-based mechanism grounded in self-control theory. It further identifies competitive climate as an organizational boundary condition that managers can redesign or reduce to contain the behavioral costs of time poverty.