All eyes on the bottom line: a goal-shielding perspective of team bottom-line mentality and team creative service performance

Purpose Organizations increasingly pressure service teams to meet financial targets, yet such bottom-line focus may quietly erode the creativity that differentiates service experiences. Drawing on goal shielding theory and situational strength arguments, we develop and test a team-level model in which team bottom-line mentality (BLM) suppresses team creative process engagement and, in turn, team creative service performance. We further argue that this negative effect is amplified when teams hold a strong shared vision that makes bottom-line goals more central and collectively enforced. Design/methodology/approach We tested our hypotheses using three-wave, multisource data from frontline service teams in a Chinese hotel chain (429 employees nested in 62 teams), with supervisors rating team creative service performance. Findings Team-level analyses indicate that team BLM is negatively associated with team creative process engagement, which mediates the negative relationship between team BLM and team creative service performance. As predicted, team shared vision strengthens the negative team BLM–creative process engagement link, producing a significant moderated mediation: the indirect effect of team BLM on creative service performance via creative process engagement is strongest when shared vision is high. Originality/value In our work, we advance the BLM literature by (1) theorizing and testing goal shielding as a process explanation for why bottom-line focus can suppress team creativity and (2) identifying a theoretically important boundary condition – shared vision – that can unintentionally intensify bottom-line prioritization and further depress creative engagement in service teams.