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 signifiantly 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 offring 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 affcted by employee’s work enjoyment, competence, and autonomy, while service offring adaptive behavior is positively inflenced by work enjoyment and competence. In addition, both types of adaptive behavior of frontline employees have signifiant effcts on employee’s service performance. The fidings provide benefis to hospital managers. Since work enjoyment, competence, and autonomy positively affct 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.