Employee Incivility Research Articles

Customer and Employee Incivility and Its Causal Effects in the Hospitality Industry

ABSTRACTThe present research sought to understand customer and employee incivility in the hospitality industry. The study identified customer actions that are perceived as uncivil by employees and coping strategies used by employees after experiencing uncivil behavior. Finally, service-recovery situations are differentiated from security-related incidents and guidance is offered to hospitality managers regarding the minimization of customer incivility. An empirical survey was distributed to 297 hotel employees. Regression analysis indicated that the effects of customer incivility were an increase in: customer aggression, employee negative emotions, employee-to-customer incivility, employee-to-employee incivility, and employee sensitivity to uncivil acts. The effects of employee-to-employee incivility were increased customer aggression and negative emotions, but decreased sensitivity to uncivil acts. Uncivil behaviors by customers included insulting comments, anger, frustration, verbal attacks, and condescending behavior. The identification of uncivil behaviors and their effects can assist in training staff in identifying and managing such actions and in devising mitigation strategies.

Effect of employee incivility on customer retaliation through psychological contract breach: The moderating role of moral identity

This study investigates the effect of employee incivility on customer retaliation through psychological contract breach in the context of upscale restaurants. Results of our study (N=2014) show that psychological contract breach mediates the positive relationship between employee incivility and three forms of customer retaliatory behaviors. Further, drawing upon the moral identity perspective, we found that customers who are high in moral identity tend to be more likely to seek revenge by engaging in vindictive complaining (but not third party complaining or negative word of mouth) subsequent to their experience of psychological contract breach. Our study yielded both theoretical contributions and practical implications.

The Relationship between Coworker Incivility, Emotional Exhaustion, and Organizational Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Emotional Exhaustion

AbstractThe aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between coworker incivility, emotional exhaustion, and organizational outcomes measured by job satisfaction, job performance, and turnover intention. Working with a sample of 286 retail bank employees in South Korea, structural equation modeling is employed to test four hypotheses drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory and affective events theory (AET). According to the analyses, while employee incivility positively affects emotional exhaustion, emotional exhaustion has a negative effect on job satisfaction and job performance. In addition, emotional exhaustion has a positive impact on turnover intention among organizational employees. These results imply that to better understand the relationship between coworker incivility and organizational outcomes, it is necessary to consider emotional exhaustion as an important mediating variable. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, together with its limitations and future research directions.

Exploring the effects of individual customer incivility encounters on employee incivility: The moderating roles of entity (in)civility and negative affectivity.

Incivility between customers and employees is common in many service organizations. These encounters can have negative outcomes for employees, customers, and the organization. To date, researchers have tended to study incivility as an aggregated and accumulated phenomenon (entity perspective). In the present study, we examined incivility as it occurs during a specific service encounter (event perspective) alongside the entity perspective. Using a mixed-method multilevel field study of customer service interactions, we show that individual customer incivility encounters (i.e., events) trigger employee incivility as a function of the employee's overall accumulated impression of the (in)civility in his or her customer interactions, such that the effects are more pronounced among employees who generally perceive their customer interactions to be more versus less civil. We also find that these interactive effects occur only among employees who are lower (vs. higher) in negative affectivity. Our results show that, in order to expand the understanding of customer incivility, it is important to study the incivility encounter, the social context in which negative customer interactions occur, and individual differences.

Untangling Employee and Customer Incivility Spirals: Hardiness and Boredom in Service Interactions

Workplace incivility research has focused on the accumulated effects of workplace incivility, overlooking that incivility occurs within specific events. The authors drew on workplace incivility the...

The Role of Job Demands and Emotional Exhaustion in the Relationship Between Customer and Employee Incivility

Workplace incivility research has focused on within-organizational sources of incivility, and less attention has been paid to outside-organizational sources such as customers. In a cross-sectional field study, the authors found that service employees (N = 307) who reported higher levels of uncivil treatment from customers engaged in higher levels of incivility toward customers. Specifically, the results show that customer incivility toward employees is related to employee incivility toward customers through job demands first and then emotional exhaustion. The authors discuss the implications of these results and highlight directions for future research.