Abstract
Despite the large body of research on workplace mistreatment, surprisingly few studies have examined the interaction effect of multiple interpersonal stressors on employee outcomes. To fill this gap, our research aimed to test the moderating effects of coworker incivility and customer incivility on the relationship between abusive supervision, emotional exhaustion, and job performance. Analyses conducted on 651 South Korean frontline service employees revealed that abusive supervision exerted a significant indirect effect on job performance through emotional exhaustion. Customer incivility strengthened the positive relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion, as well as the indirect effect of abusive supervision on job performance through emotional exhaustion. Our post hoc analysis demonstrated a three-way interaction between abusive supervision, coworker incivility, and customer incivility; the relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion was significantly positive only when coworker incivility was high and customer incivility was low. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.
Highlights
Frontline service employees (FSEs) often play a “punching bag” role in organizations.They are the ones who directly receive complaints from customers
Drawing on the findings suggesting that supervisors, coworkers, and customers are the most common sources of interpersonal stress experienced by FSEs [3,6], we hypothesized abusive supervision, coworker incivility, and customer incivility to be key interpersonal stressors for FSEs
Synthesizing the aforementioned hypotheses, we propose moderated mediation relationships in which coworker incivility and customer incivility moderate the indirect effect of abusive supervision on job performance through emotional exhaustion
Summary
Frontline service employees (FSEs) often play a “punching bag” role in organizations.They are the ones who directly receive complaints from customers. Despite mounting evidence that FSEs deal with multiple interpersonal stressors [1,2,3,4,5], surprisingly few studies have explored the joint effect of multiple interpersonal stressors on FSEs’ work outcomes To fill this gap, our research aimed to examine the relationship between FSEs’ multiple interpersonal stressors, emotional exhaustion, and job performance. Prior research has demonstrated the deleterious effects of abusive supervision [1,7,8], coworker incivility [3,6], and customer incivility [1,3,4,9,10,11,12,13] on FSEs’ work outcomes This stream of research has identified emotional exhaustion (feeling emotionally fatigued and drained) as a mediator that translates the negative effect of abusive supervision into job performance [1,14]. We sought to replicate the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion on the abusive supervision–
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