Research on the "dark side" of organizational behavior has determined that employee sabotage is most often a reaction by disgruntled employees to perceived mistreatment. To date, however, most studies on employee retaliation have focused on intra-organizational sources of (in)justice. Results from this field study of customer service representatives (N = 358) showed that interpersonal injustice from customers relates positively to customer-directed sabotage over and above intra-organizational sources of fairness. Moreover, the association between unjust treatment and sabotage was moderated by 2 dimensions of moral identity (symbolization and internalization) in the form of a 3-way interaction. The relationship between injustice and sabotage was more pronounced for employees high (vs. low) in symbolization, but this moderation effect was weaker among employees who were high (vs. low) in internalization. Last, employee sabotage was negatively related to job performance ratings.

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 crosssectional 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.

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.

The multifoci perspective of justice proposes that individuals tend to target their (in)justice reactions toward the perceived source of the mistreatment. Empirical support for target-specific reactions, however, has been mixed. To explore theoretically relevant reasons for these discrepant results and address unanswered questions in the multifoci justice literature, the present research examines how different justice sources might interactively predict target-specific reactions, and whether these effects occur as a function of moral identity. Results from a sample of North American frontline service employees (N = 314, Study 1) showed that among employees with lower levels of moral identity, low supervisor justice exacerbated the association between low customer justice and customer-directed sabotage, whereas this exacerbation effect was not observed among employees with higher levels of moral identity. This 3-way interaction effect was replicated in a sample of South Korean employees (N = 265, Study 2).

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