Human Resource Management 2025
Service Work as Lived Experience: A Problematizing Review
Abstract
Between employee burnout and growing recruitment challenges, a systemic crisis confronts the service industry. One reason lies in the scope of received human resource management (HRM) approaches, which often emphasize organizational performance metrics at the expense of the emotional, social, and material experiences of doing frontline service work. As a result, many HRM solutions do not fully address the experiential realities that shape employee wellbeing, engagement, and retention. This paper calls for a stronger focus on how service workers interpret, inhabit, and appropriate the everyday realities of their work. Through a problematizing review, we build on an emerging, inter‐disciplinary body of research that builds rich, grounded accounts of frontline service experiences. We propose a new experience‐centric framework—a set of theoretical tools and a conceptual vocabulary that put forth a more holistic understanding of the lived experience of service work. We conclude by offering a set of recommendations that can help foster more resilient, engaged, and people‐centered service environments.
- DOI
- 10.1002/hrm.70045
- Sources
- openalex