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Abstract
Past literature in the area of employee–customer interactions suggests that being mistreated by customers is deemed one of the most important work-related stressors for service employees. However, little is known about the effects of customer mistreatment on the family domain. In a representative sample of 221 front-line employees in the East China hairdressing industry using three separate surveys administered 1 month apart respectively, the current study explores the mediation effects of work-to-family conflict (WFC) and the moderation effects of psychological detachment (PD) and leader–member exchange (LMX) on the relationship between customer mistreatment and family satisfaction (FS). The research revealed that the employees confronted with intensive customer mistreatment tended to experience high levels of WFC, and WFC mediated the effects of customer mistreatment on FS. In addition, both PD and LMX attenuated customer mistreatment’s direct effects on WFC and indirect effects on FS (via WFC). This study contributes to the managerial psychology literature related to the customer mistreatment construct and a better understanding of how PD and LMX act as a work-family spillover effect moderator of customer mistreatment on individuals.
Highlights
Work has identified that customer mistreatment was a daily occurrence in the service industry (e.g., Grandey et al, 2004, 2007), and likely represented the most important future source of work stress for service workers (Dudenhöffer and Dormann, 2013)
We developed an integrated model that explored both the mechanism linking customer mistreatment to family satisfaction and the moderating effects of psychological detachment and leader–member exchange (LMX)
By applying the S-S-O framework, as expected, the study findings reveal that work-to-family conflict (WFC) would act as a mediator between customer mistreatment and family satisfaction, and that psychological detachment and LMX would attenuate both the direct effects of customer mistreatment on WFC and the indirect effects of customer mistreatment on family satisfaction via WFC
Summary
Work has identified that customer mistreatment was a daily occurrence in the service industry (e.g., Grandey et al, 2004, 2007), and likely represented the most important future source of work stress for service workers (Dudenhöffer and Dormann, 2013). In the past decade, emerging studies have demonstrated that customer mistreatment can have negative consequences in terms of victim well-being (e.g., Grandey et al, 2004; Chi et al, 2018; Park and Kim, 2019) and work behavior (e.g., Skarlicki et al, 2008; Shao and Skarlicki, 2014; Baranik et al, 2017; Garcia et al, 2019) Despite these fruitful findings, the effects of customer mistreatment on the family domain for service employees remain almost unexplored, and this lack of knowledge is problematic, for family is one of the most important non-work domain which strongly relates to one’s well-being, work attitude and behavior (Casper et al, 2007). The effects of customer mistreatment on the family domain for service employees remain almost unexplored, and this lack of knowledge is problematic, for family is one of the most important non-work domain which strongly relates to one’s well-being, work attitude and behavior (Casper et al, 2007). Zhang et al (2016) call for studies to illustrate how customer-related stressors adversely affect the targets’ family domain
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