How Does Customer Mistreatment Lead to Employee Retaliation? From The Lens of Self-Threat

Abstract

Customer mistreatment is a serious issue faced by employees and significantly undermines their service behaviors. Previous studies have identified two mechanisms underlying the negative effects of customer mistreatment—by generating negative emotions and injustice perceptions. In this paper, we advance a new mechanism and argue that customer mistreatment engenders a threat for how employees feel about themselves—defined as self-threat—which further undermines their customer-oriented behaviors and leads to sabotage against customers. With an online experiment, we show that self-threat mediates the effect of customer mistreatment on reduced customer-oriented behaviors and increased customer-directed sabotage, especially for those whose self-worth is contingent on their workplace performance. A field experiment with medical professionals further shows that self-affirmation intervention attenuated the effect of patient mistreatment on medical professionals’ self-threat and further decreased their sabotage against patients. This paper contributes to research of customer mistreatment by illuminating a new mechanism, highlighting the risk group impacted by customer mistreatment and suggesting a new way to alleviate negative impacts of customer mistreatment.