How do observing employees react to customer incivility toward colleagues?

Abstract

In the hospitality industry, employees often experience and witness customer incivility, defined as low-intensity adverse behavior without apparent purpose of physical violence toward an employee. However, there has been no research on how observing employees react to their victimized colleagues. In line with affective events theory, this study developed a third-party framework to explore the effect of observed customer incivility on hospitality employees’ differential responses to their colleagues. By analyzing data collected via a time-lagged survey in the Chinese hospitality industry, we concluded that observers’ reactions differ depending on goal interdependence. When the observers work cooperatively toward goals with the victim employee, observed customer incivility arouses the observer’s sympathy and further promotes their helping behaviors; in contrast, when the observers compete with the victim employee to achieve goals, observed customer incivility evokes schadenfreude (delight in others’ misfortune) in the observers and further impels them to add to the incivility.