Positive emotional cues at work: how customer empowering behavior promotes proactive customer service via psychological safety

Drawing on affective events theory and social exchange perspectives, we conceptualize customer empowering behavior (CEB) as a positive emotional cue that heightens employees’ psychological safety, thereby promoting approach-oriented proactive customer service. We further propose that regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) shapes these emotion-to-action pathways. We tested a moderated mediation model in a three-wave, multi-source field study of frontline service employees in Thailand (Time 1: CEB and regulatory focus; Time 2: psychological safety; Time 3: supervisor-rated proactive customer service; N = 236 employees nested within 32 supervisors). Hierarchical regressions and bootstrapped conditional-process analyses showed that CEB positively predicted proactive customer service and that psychological safety partially mediated this relationship. Moreover, promotion focus strengthened, whereas prevention focus weakened, the effect of CEB on psychological safety, yielding a stronger indirect effect of CEB on proactive service via psychological safety under high promotion and a weaker one under high prevention focus. These findings position CEB as a positive affective event in service encounters, identify psychological safety as the emotional pathway through which empowering cues translate into discretionary effort, and offer actionable implications for shaping customer interactions and motivational climates that enhance employees’ positive emotional experiences at work.