Purpose Using equity theory, this study aims to examine the role of customer incivility in effecting service sabotage among hotel employees by recognizing the mediating role of revenge motivation and the moderating effect of emotion regulation. Design/methodology/approach A multi-wave, multi-source questionnaire survey was conducted with 291 employee–supervisor dyads at chain hotels in Shenzhen, China. Previously developed and validated measures for customer incivility, revenge motivation, emotion regulation and service sabotage were adopted to test the hypotheses. Findings Customer incivility increased employees’ revenge motivation and service sabotage. Emotion regulation acted as a boundary condition for customer incivility’s direct effect on revenge motivation and its indirect effect on service sabotage through revenge motivation. Cognitive reappraisal mitigated the detrimental influence of customer incivility, whereas expressive suppression worsened its adverse effects. Practical implications Managers should monitor and deter the emergence of uncivil behaviors, provide psychological support for employees experiencing customer incivility and encourage these employees to use cognitive reappraisal rather than expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has investigated the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship in the hotel industry. This study sheds light on how customer incivility can motivate service sabotage among hotel employees. Furthermore, the authors used equity theory rather than the commonly adopted resources perspective to offer new insights into the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship.

This study examines why and when negative workplace gossip promotes self-serving behaviors by the employees being targeted. Using conservation of resources (COR) theory, we find that targets tend to increase their political acts as a result of ego depletion triggered by negative gossip. We also show that sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment and moral disengagement moderate this process. Specifically, we demonstrate that targets with high levels of sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment are more likely to experience ego depletion, and that targets with high levels of moral disengagement will find it easier to persuade themselves to engage in political acts. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged survey of 265 employees in Guangdong, China, to test our hypotheses. The results support our theoretical model and indicate that COR theory can be used to explain the impacts of negative workplace gossip. Alongside our important and timely theoretical contributions, we provide new perspectives on how managers can avoid or mitigate these political acts.

In the complex context of green consumption, researchers have examined the impact of many variables on pro-environmental behaviours, but have paid little attention to the effects of specific combinations of factors. This study fills this gap, using innovative methods to show how a combination of demographic variables, values, normative influence, personality traits and beliefs can stimulate travellers' willingness to pay more (WLP), using one qualitative and two quantitative studies. In a strong methodological contribution, we develop a model based on complexity theory, which was validated using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 642 travellers. The results indicate that our integrated model has a favourable level of predictive power for travellers' behaviour. Our findings suggest that no single factor is sufficient to drive travellers' willingness to pay more, but the results of the fsQCA in four configurations propose eight causal recipes for achieving high WLP. Alongside its significant methodological contribution, our study makes strong theoretical and practical contributions, including how managers can target their green travel products more effectively.