Abuse from Organizational Outsiders: Customer Aggression and Incivility

Yagil, Dana

doi:10.1007/978-981-10-5154-8_3-1

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…These responses can be classified into "fight"ventingor "flight"denial, avoidance and disengagementresponses. For FSE, "flight" or avoidance of the situation is oftentimes not possible, which makes a "fight" response more likely to occur (Yagil, 2018).…”

Section: Employee Responses To Customer Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye for an eye? Frontline service employee reactions to customer incivility

Frey-Cordes

Eilert

Büttgen

2020

JSM

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Purpose Frontline service employees (FSEs) face high demands of emotional labor when dealing with difficult, and sometimes even uncivil, customer behavior while attempting to deliver service with a smile. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior. The authors investigate two potential processes – ego threat and perceived interactional justice – and further address boundary conditions of this effect. Design/methodology/approach The data for this paper were collected in three studies: one field experiment and two online experiments using adult samples. Hypotheses were tested and data was analyzed using ANOVA and regression-based modeling approaches. Findings Findings from a field-experimental study and online experiments show that FSEs offer lower service levels to uncivil customers. The authors further find that this effect is mediated by a perceived ego threat and that employees’ regulation of emotion (ROE), as part of their emotional intelligence, attenuates the effect of perceived ego threats on service levels. Research limitations/implications This study finds that perceived ego threat (but not perceived interactional justice) explains why employees respond negatively to uncivil customer behavior. Therefore, it offers an emotion-driven explanation of retaliatory behavior in frontline service contexts. Implications for theories focusing on service value co-destruction and customer incivility are discussed. Practical implications The findings from this research show that ROE attenuates the impact of perceived ego threat on employee retaliatory behavior. Managerial implications include developing and training employees on emotion regulation. Furthermore, managers should identify alternative ways for restoring an employee’s ego after the employee experiences uncivil customer behavior. Originality/value The authors propose and test two processes that can explain why employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior to gain a deeper understanding of which processes, or a combination of the two, drive employee responses. Furthermore, the authors shed insights into boundary conditions and explore when employees are less likely to react to uncivil customer behavior while experiencing ego threat.

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Section: Employee Responses To Customer Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye for an eye? Frontline service employee reactions to customer incivility

Frey-Cordes

Eilert

Büttgen

2020

JSM

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show abstract

“…Besides electronic searches, a manual search was also conducted by checking the reference lists of reviews and meta-analytic articles on customer mistreatment (e.g. Arvan et al , 2019; Koopmann et al , 2015; Okan et al , 2021; Wang et al , 2021; Yagil, 2021). Furthermore, key words in several scholarly conferences were searched (the Academy of Management, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Annual Meeting and the American Psychological Association Work, Stress and Health Conference) and fellow researchers specializing in the area of customer mistreatment were emailed for unpublished articles.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The antecedents of customer mistreatment: a meta-analytic review

Liu

et al. 2022

IJCHM

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Purpose Frontline service employees are often subjected to customer mistreatment and considerable studies have tested outcomes of customer mistreatment. However, the importance of its antecedents is particularly underestimated. This meta-analytic paper aims to develop an overarching framework that identifies the antecedents of customer mistreatment as well as potential boundary conditions to account for observed variations reported in extant studies. Design/methodology/approach Comprehensive electronic and manual searches were performed to retrieve relevant studies on customer mistreatment, which yielded 125 articles, including 141 independent samples. Altogether, these studies included 40,151 participants. The data were analyzed through random-effect meta-analytic methods in R using the psychmeta package. Findings Three types of antecedents were identified. In particular, regarding employees’ demographic characteristics, age was found to be negatively correlated with customer mistreatment. Employees’ personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, positive affectivity, emotion regulation ability and self-efficacy were found to be negatively correlated with customer mistreatment, while neuroticism and negative affectivity were positively correlated with customer mistreatment. In terms of contextual factors, perceived social support and service climate were negatively related to customer mistreatment, whereas job demands were positively related to customer mistreatment. Moreover, the power distance culture and types of service industries moderated some relationships. Originality/value This meta-analytic research, drawing upon the perpetrator predation framework, proposed a new and comprehensive framework to explain why customer mistreatment occurs. It not only promoted the advancement of literature on customer mistreatment but also provided effective and targeted guidance for helping frontline service employees reduce such negative experience.

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“…This can adversely affect employee physical and mental health ( Hwang et al, 2021 ). Therefore, dysfunctional customer behaviors are one of the key predictors driving frontline service employee sabotage action ( Yagil, 2021 ), such as joking about customers or colleagues to please themselves, neglecting to comply with company rules and regulations, adjusting the speed of service according to one’s own emotions or personal needs, expressing hostility, anger, or frustration to customers, deliberately delaying service depending on employees’ moods and emotions, deliberately making inappropriate remarks or responses to customers, retaliating against customers in a rude manner, etc. ( Harris and Ogbonna, 2009 ; Chi et al, 2013 ; Lee and Ok, 2014 ).…”

Section: Research Framework and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Service staff encounters with dysfunctional customer behavior: Does supervisor support mitigate negative emotions?

et al. 2022

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Dysfunctional customer behavior is common in service settings. For frontline employees, negative encounters can cause short-term despondency or have profound, long-term psychological effects that often result in both direct and indirect costs to service firms. Existing research has explored the influence of dysfunctional customer behavior on employee emotions, but it has not fully investigated the psychological mechanism through which customer misbehavior transforms into employee responses. To maintain service quality and employee well-being, it is important to understand the impact of customer misconduct on employee emotions and its effect on subsequent service behavior. To assess the process through which dysfunctional customer behavior manifests as negative emotions in frontline service employees, and the influence of negative employee emotions on their prosocial service behavior, we surveyed 185 frontline banking service employees. We sought information on service employee experiences, attitudes, and feelings regarding dysfunctional customer behaviors, the perceived level of supervisor support, and employee prosocial service behavior intentions. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling were used for statistical analysis and hypothesis verification. Results indicate that dysfunctional customer behavior has a positive relationship with bank service employee negative emotions and a negative influence on employee prosocial service behavior. The study found that negative emotions fully mediated the relationship between dysfunctional customer behavior and prosocial service behavior. The moderating role that perceived supervisor support plays on the relationships between dysfunctional customer behavior and negative emotion was also investigated. The results show that perceived supervisor support moderates the relationship between dysfunctional customer behavior and negative employee emotions. Finally, the study provides bank managers with effective strategies to assist frontline employees to manage and deter dysfunctional customer behavior, and presents employees with internal recovery strategies when encountering dysfunctional customer behavior.

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Abuse from Organizational Outsiders: Customer Aggression and Incivility

Cited by 12 publications

References 81 publications

Eye for an eye? Frontline service employee reactions to customer incivility

Eye for an eye? Frontline service employee reactions to customer incivility

The antecedents of customer mistreatment: a meta-analytic review

Service staff encounters with dysfunctional customer behavior: Does supervisor support mitigate negative emotions?

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