Antecedents and Consequences of Adaptive Behavior of Frontline Employees in The Health Care Service

Abstract:Frontline employees’ adaptive behavior is essential to an interactive and customized service like health care because it contributes significantly to customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, less is known about what factors drive employees to perform adaptive behavior. This research aims to investigate the antecedents and consequences of adaptive behavior (including interpersonal and service offering adaptive behaviors) of frontline employees in the health care service. Based on the data of 418 cases of physicians working at public and private hospitals and clinics, the analysis reveals that interpersonal adaptive behavior is positively affected by employee’s work enjoyment, competence, and autonomy, while service offering adaptive behavior is positively influenced by work enjoyment and competence. In addition, both types of adaptive behavior of frontline employees have significant effects on employee’s service performance. The findings provide benefits to hospital managers. Since work enjoyment, competence, and autonomy positively affect physicians’ adaptive behavior, which then leads to better performance, adequate training on professional knowledge and interpersonal skills for health care practitioners as well as appropriate empowerment practices are highly recommended.