Abstract
In the service sector, customer-related social stressors may weaken employees’ well-being, impairing job-related outcomes. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory and on the psychology of sustainability, fostering personal resources become critical to encourage service providers who can effectively manage such job demands. This study investigated how customer-related social stressors and customer orientation influence service recovery performance and whether resilience buffers the negative effects of customer incivility on service recovery performance. One hundred and fifty-seven Italian customer-contact employees completed a questionnaire analyzing customer incivility, customer-related social stressors, resilience, customer orientation, and service recovery performance. Regression analyses and SEMs were conducted. Although all customer-related social stressors indirectly and negatively influenced service recovery performance by increasing burnout symptoms, customer incivility only exerted a direct and detrimental impact on service recovery performance. Customer orientation was directly and positively associated with service recovery performance. Highly resilient employees were less affected by variations in service recovery performance across customer incivility levels. Within the psychology of sustainability framework, promoting resilient workplaces is crucial to foster healthy and sustainable work settings. Service organizations can greatly benefit from providing their employees with psychological resilience training programs, cultivating high customer-oriented attitudes through mentoring sessions, and hiring highly customer-oriented and resilient employees for customer-contact occupations.
Highlights
Nowadays, service organizations strive to deliver exceptional quality to their customers to succeed within increasingly competitive market environments [1]
This study investigated how customer-related social stressors and customer orientation influence service recovery performance and whether resilience buffers the negative effects of customer incivility on service recovery performance
To the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have analyzed resilience as a possible buffer for negative effects of customer incivility (CI) on service recovery performance (SRP). To fill these gaps, drawing on the Conservation of Resource theory (COR) [16] and adopting the service provider perspective, the current study investigated how customer-related social stressors (CSSs) and individual-level customer orientation (CO) influence SRP and whether resilience buffer the detrimental influence of CI on employees’ SRP. This is one of the first studies to analyze this topic within the psychology of sustainability framework [17,18,19] which represents a promising research area for promoting healthy organizations [18] and improving employees’ quality of life [20], all factors that are conducive to successful business [21,22] (From a psychological perspective, the word “sustainability” refers to balance current objectives with future aims without jeopardizing the latter by avoiding harmful actions within the ecological and socio-economic environment [23], and to promote individual well-being by stimulating their enrichment, growth, and flexible change and by facilitating the acquisition of resources [17])
Summary
Service organizations strive to deliver exceptional quality to their customers to succeed within increasingly competitive market environments [1]. To the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have analyzed resilience as a possible buffer for negative effects of customer incivility (CI) on SRP To fill these gaps, drawing on the Conservation of Resource theory (COR) [16] and adopting the service provider perspective, the current study investigated how CSSs and individual-level CO influence SRP and whether resilience buffer the detrimental influence of CI on employees’ SRP. The rest of this paper is organized as following: (1) the section briefly reviews the related literature around the relationships between CCSs and SRP as well as the protective role of resilience and CO in maintaining SRP, and develops direct, mediating, and moderating hypotheses. (2) The second section describes the empirical setting of this study, including materials and methods. (3) The third section presents the statistical analyses and reports the empirical results, and (4) The final section discusses findings, limitations and practical implications, and concludes the study
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