An Examination of the Antecedents and Consequences of Customer Mistreatment

Abstract

Considerable research has documented the detrimental impact of customer mistreatment on service employees’ well-being and behaviors. Extending this research, we have integrated the conservation of resources theory and conflict management literature to investigate the antecedents and consequences of customer mistreatment and the boundary conditions around these effects. Specifically, we propose that when service employees have bad sleep at night, they are likely to experience negative affect in the next morning due to the loss of emotional resources, which in turn lead to their perceived customer mistreatment, and resulting in customer-directed sabotage on that day. We further propose that employees’ problem-solving conflict management style could attenuate the effects of customer mistreatment on sabotage and the indirect effect of sleep quality on sabotage via negative affect and customer mistreatment such that these direct and indirect effects exist only among employees with lower (versus higher) problem-solving conflict management style. We conducted a daily diary survey to test our predictions among 88 call center employees on five consecutive working days. Our findings supported most of our predictions. Our research highlights the importance to consider employees’ resource gain/loss at home when studying customer mistreatment and emphasizes the employees’ knowledge and skills in attenuating the effects of customer mistreatment.