A meta-analysis of the impact of customer mistreatment on service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes

Abstract

PurposeAlthough service researchers have long suggested that customer mistreatment adversely impacts service employees' outcomes, statistical integration of current empirical findings has been lacking. This meta-analysis aims to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors included 221 effect sizes of 135 independent samples from 119 primary studies (N = 47,964). The authors used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively review the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-analysis structural equation modeling was used to explore the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual-level moderators (i.e. service provider type and service delivery mode) on these relationships. Furthermore, we compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other organizational-related factors on some commonly measured employee outcomes.FindingsThe results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. negative emotions), attitudinal outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. job performance, surface acting and emotional labor). Additionally, service employees' negative emotions mediate the association between customer mistreatment and employees' job satisfaction, turnover intention, surface acting and emotional labor. Furthermore, the relationships between customer mistreatment and service employees' negative emotions and job performance are influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e. service delivery mode).Originality/valueThe authors contribute to the literature by providing robust meta-analytic estimates of the effects of customer mistreatment on a variety of service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the different magnitudes of the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and other job-related and personality-related factors by quantifying the true variability of the effect sizes. The authors draw on current theories underpinning customer mistreatment to test a theoretical model of the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. service employees' negative emotions) on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The authors explore the effects of two contextual-level factors (i.e. service provider types and service delivery mode) related to the service delivery context that may account for the variability of effect sizes across empirical studies.

Frontline service employee research: integration of systematic literature reviews and recommendations for future scholarship

“…Consistent with the theme of employee harm and vulnerability, the third paper in this SI (Wu et al, 2023) examines the relationship between customer mistreatment and attitudinal/ behavioral outcomes with FLE negative emotions as the mediator. Utilizing a structural equations modeling based meta-analysis of k 5 119 studies, (Wu et al, 2023) find that negative emotions mediate the relationship between customer mistreatment and attitudinal outcomes (job satisfaction, turnover intent) and two behavioral outcomes (emotional labor and surface acting), but do not influence deep acting or job performance. Further, service delivery mode operates as a significant moderator of the effect of customer mistreatment on negative emotions and job performance in that this relationship is stronger for face-to-face than virtual service delivery.…”

“…Noting a dearth of experience sampling studies in the literature, the authors also recommend that scholars measure the fluctuations in negative emotions using a within-employee design. We add that, while the majority of studies in (Wu et al, 2023) review rely on retrospective selfreport of negative emotions, incorporating physiological measures to assess emotions could more accurately reflect their dynamic natures (e.g. Verhulst et al, 2020).…”

“…The inclusion of two studies (Walker et al, 2023;Wu et al, 2023) in this SI on the impact customers have on FLE underscores the important role customers have in co-creating service. Walker et al (2023) focus on the service encounter level, whereas (Wu et al's, 2023) metaanalysis focuses on how the accumulation of customer mistreatment across service encounters affects FLEs.…”

“…Consistent with this argument, the primary foci of all the reviews in this SI are psychological variables examined at the level of individual FLEs or customers and in the case of Yue et al, 2023 at the level of the team. At the individual level of analysis, these psychological variables include employee engagement (Michel et al, 2023), negative emotions (Wu et al, 2023), emotional labor and regulation (Walker et al, 2023) and employee vulnerability (Riedel et al, 2023); and at the team level, these are construed as collective mechanisms such as shared affect, team climate and transactive memory systems with their origins in individual psychological variables such as affect, attitudes and perceptions (Yue et al, 2023). These psychological mechanismswhether measured at the individual level of analysis or aggregated to constitute collective constructstranslate into key outcomes for the FLEs and customers.…”

“…Systematic reviewswhether they be bibliometric analyses aimed at revealing the underlying structure of the literature (van Eck et al, 2014) or meta-analytic studies focusing on the identification of true effect-sizes across studies (Rosenthal, 1991) are comprehensive in their scope, structured in their analytic and reporting methods, and transparent in terms of the search and inclusion criteria for studies (Hiebl, 2023). This SI includes five systematic reviewsfour of which are meta-analyses (Michel et al, 2023;Riedel et al, 2023;Wu et al, 2023 andYue et al, 2023) and one is a bibliometric analysis (Walker et al, 2023). These articles cover a variety of FLE-related topicscustomer mistreatment, employee engagement, vulnerability and teamwork, among others.…”