Feeling bad and doing good: The effect of customer mistreatment on service employee's daily display of helping behaviors

Abstract

Mistreatment by customers is a common occurrence for many frontline service employees. Although some evidence suggests that employees engage in dysfunctional workplace behaviors as a result of mistreatment, others studies have suggested that employees may cope with such negative experiences by helping others. Drawing on negative state relief theory, we conducted 2 studies to test these relationships and examine whether service employees cope with negative emotions arising from such daily customer mistreatment by engaging in helping others. In Study 1, daily surveys from 70 restaurant employees showed that daily customer mistreatment predicted the experience of negative moods the next morning, which, in turn, led to higher levels of coworker helping the next day. In Study 2, daily surveys from 54 retail employees showed that daily customer mistreatment led to higher customer helping the next day, but only when customer orientation was high. Our results further show that helping behavior was associated with elevated positive affective experiences and that the proposed relationships differ depending on whether customer mistreatment is measured at a daily or a cumulative perspective. Specifically, cumulative customer mistreatment over time decreased general helping. These findings are discussed in relation to employees' coping strategies towards acute and cumulative mistreatment.

Feeling activated and acting unethically: The influence of activated mood on unethical behavior to benefit a teammate

“…We examined our predictions in Study 1 using experience sampling method or ESM, which is one appropriate methodology for assessing the influence of mood (Glomb, Bhave, Miner, & Wall, ; Rothbard & Wilk, ; To et al., ; Wang et al., ; Yue, Wang, & Groth, ). Using this methodology, we assessed mood and creative mindset in the morning and unethical behavior in the evening for 10 working days.…”

The Role of Service Providers’ Resilience in Buffering the Negative Impact of Customer Incivility on Service Recovery Performance

“…It captures the extent to which interacting with consumers is intrinsically pleasurable [10,81,82]. CO contributes to determine a service organization's business success [32,[83][84][85] by decreasing negative individual and organizational-level consequences, such as burnout and turnover intentions [80,[86][87][88], and by enhancing numerous job-related outcomes, including organizational commitment, job satisfaction [89], organizational citizenship behaviors [81], work engagement, job performance [80,86], and in particular SRP [13,90,91]. Assuming the COR theory perspective [66], CO can be considered as a personal coping resource [16,78] which makes customer-contact employees better at minimizing their losses because it predisposes them to seek additional resources to solve customers' problems [92] and cope better with CSSs [78].…”

Momentary Effects of Customer Incivility and Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Coping Strategies

“…Thus, findings derived from aggregated measurements can not be automatically applied to the incident level (e.g. Yue, Wang, & Groth, 2017). Our research thus supplements previous studies in providing a more holistic picture on service employees' resource trajectory following negative workplace incidences such as customer incivility.…”