Are frontline employees punching bags? The relationship between interpersonal workplace incivility and employee incivility toward customers

Abstract

This study aims to find the impact caused by influential behaviors such as incivility emanating from three stakeholders of the Frontline employees' role, including customers, coworkers, and supervisors, to frontline employees. This study aims to explore the causal relationship between interpersonal incivility in the workplace, surface acting, emotional exhaustion and employee incivility toward customers, and the moderating effect of role identity in the restaurant industry. This study adopted self-reported questionnaire which has good reliability and validity (five-point Likert scale) by considering common method variance problem prevention at the same time to measure the variables’ levels in incivility, surface action, emotional exhaustion, and role identity. This study fills in the research gap in explaining the interactive mechanisms among frontline employees' incivility towards customers, and the incivility behaviors that frontline employees received from supervisors and coworkers, as well as the theoretical and practical roles that surface acting and emotional exhaustion play during the mechanism, in which the perspectives of revenge psychology and Conservation of Resource Theory were applied and discussed inside this study. Specially, to help develp relevant research, according to the theoretical and practical conclusion of this study, the atuhors developed two new propositions and one conceptual framework according to the hindrance-challenge theory and slow and fast thinking theory.