Abstract
Purpose – this paper aims to review the main contributions in the literature on service employees’ role in initiating innovation. By adopting a synthetic approach, we also aim to highlight the variant metaphors denoting service employees’ innovative conduct within the service innovation literature.
Design/methodology/approach – the review of literature implicated diversified inclusion criteria when researching multiple databases for scholarly manuscripts; by adopting the synthesis approach to service innovation, it was possible to identify themes of interest that are relevant to service employees’ innovative behaviour in service and management literature.
Originality/value – considering the dominance of the synthesis approach to service innovation (Drejer, 2004; Nijssen et al., 2006), the emerging themes within the service innovation literature indicate further evidence of the application of the synthesis perspective. The highlighted main themes of creativity, innovative behaviour and service encounter-based innovation shared a synthesis orientation.
The review of the existing body of literature also reflected considerable paucity in empirical studies underpinning service employees’ role in initiating innovation where there is little understanding of the nature and impact of this role. Multiple terminologies exist inconsistently in the service literature denoting service employees’ innovative conduct as the research on the topic continues to evolve.
The review outcome also revealed that the present literature doesn’t adequately distinguish between the service industry’s cross-sector differences when determining service employees’ innovative conduct rather it adopts a collective approach that may not be applicable across all service industry subsectors.
Practical implications – this paper provides a useful conceptual classification of the body of literature dealing with service employees’ role in initiating innovation that may help guide future research. The review of the literature included in this paper may help connecting the inconsistent metaphors of service employees’ innovative behaviour in the existing literature and highlight the gaps to be addressed by future studies.