Frontline Employees Improvise All the Time. Managers Can Help Them Do It Well

Service firms standardize for efficiency. Customers show up with problems the standard process never anticipated. The person caught between the two is the frontline employee, who has to decide on the spot whether to follow the script or depart from it.

A study led by Steven W. Rayburn, chair of the Department of Management, with Sidney T. Anderson of the Department of Marketing, asks a question that earlier research mostly skipped. What does improvisation mean to the employees who do it, and what makes them more likely to do it? Their co-authors are Gil Luria and Dana Yagil of the University of Haifa, Yoshinori Fujikawa of Hitotsubashi University, and Mayoor Mohan of Virginia Commonwealth University.

What employees said

The team interviewed about 100 frontline employees in Israel, Japan, and the United States. They worked in financial services, retail, food service, airlines, hotels, events, and call centers, in roles from professional to entry level.

From those interviews the researchers drew a definition in the employees’ own terms. Improvisation is a spontaneous, responsive, and discretionary effort to solve an unexpected customer problem in real time.

Employees did not describe it as rare or risky. They described it as constant, and many said it is simply part of the job. What prompted it was the situation: an unexpected problem and a customer who needed an answer. Personality traits such as creativity came up far less often than prior research would suggest.

What the survey showed

The researchers then tested their model with 417 frontline employees in the United States.

Two individual traits predicted improvisation. One was self-efficacy, the employee’s confidence in their ability to handle the unexpected. The other was customer orientation, a personal commitment to meeting customer needs.

Role knowledge did not predict improvisation by itself. It mattered only in combination with the organization. Employees who knew their role well improvised more when they also felt empowered.

Organizational factors worked differently than the team first expected. The model treated them as conditions that strengthen or weaken the effect of individual traits, and the survey gave that only partial support. A follow-up analysis treated them as direct drivers and found that empowerment has a direct link to improvisation. That matched what employees had said in the interviews.

One expected barrier did not appear. Interviewees predicted that being judged on the outcome would discourage improvisation. The survey found no such effect. Employees improvise even when a failed attempt could count against them.

What it means for employees

The paper also links improvisation to employee well-being. In the survey, improvisation was associated with organizational commitment. It was not significantly associated with job satisfaction or positive mood.

Putting it to work

The authors’ advice follows from the finding that improvisation cannot be scripted away.

• Train for the role in depth, and add guidance on when and how to depart from procedure. Employees asked for role training far more than for improvisation training.
• Give employees the authority to act for the customer in the moment.
• Set a clear customer-first climate, so that empowered employees know what their improvising is for.
• Lead in a way that keeps improvisation in the open. Under restrictive managers, employees still improvise. They just hide it.

Limits

The survey sample was limited to the United States and measured everything at one point in time, so it shows associations and not causes. The organizational effects came from a post hoc analysis and need confirmation in new data.

What it means for managers

• Treat improvisation as part of the job. Scripts and monitoring are unlikely to stop it, so prepare employees for it.
• Build confidence and customer focus. These two traits predicted improvisation. Knowing the role well did not, on its own.
• Give employees room to act. Empowerment had a direct link to improvisation, and tying evaluations to outcomes did not discourage it.

Rayburn, S. W., Luria, G., Yagil, D., Fujikawa, Y., Anderson, S., & Mohan, M. (2025). Frontline employee improvisation: Uncovering its meaning, practice, and impact in service industries. Journal of Service Research. Advance online publication. 10.1177/10946705251399830