Anxiety and gratitude toward the organization: Relationships with error management culture and service recovery performance

Abstract

According to affective events theory (AET), organizational contexts can produce "affective events" that shape individuals' emotional experiences, subsequently influencing those individuals' work behaviors. This study hypothesized that every time an error occurs in an error management culture, it is an affective event that can stimulate employees' gratitude and reduce their anxiety toward their respective organizations. Gratitude and anxiety are positively and negatively associated with employees' service recovery performance, respectively. Drawing on three waves of data collected from 218 hotel employees, this study found that error management culture was positively associated with gratitude and negatively associated with anxiety. Consequently, gratitude and anxiety influenced employees' service recovery performance, as rated by the employees' supervisors. These findings suggest that error management culture can influence employees' service recovery performance through the culture's impact on gratitude and anxiety.