EXPRESS: Customer Positive Expression and Employee Behavioral Responses in Hospitality: The Role of Self-Consciousness and Career Orientation

In today’s dynamic tourism and hospitality sector, the relationship between customers and frontline employees plays a decisive role in organizational success. This study applies self-awareness theory to delineate the dual pathways through which customer positive expression influences employees’ organizational behavior and personal development. Using a dual-method design, we conducted an online experiment with 708 participants and a three-wave field survey involving 1,159 frontline hotel employees across Pakistan, China, and USA. The findings reveal that customer positive expression enhances organizational citizenship behavior by increasing employees’ public self-consciousness, with this effect being stronger among employees with an extrinsic career orientation. Moreover, customer positive expression fosters self-development behaviors by elevating private self-consciousness, particularly for employees with an intrinsic career orientation. Multi-group analysis revealed no significant cultural differences across the three countries, suggesting the model’s cross-cultural generalizability.