An Investigation of the Role of Job Resources in Mitigating Customer-Related Social Stressors and Emotional Exhaustion

Abstract

The effects of job resources on customer-related social stressors and emotional exhaustion, including the relationships of these stressors with emotional exhaustion, are tested with a sample of frontline bank employees in Northern Cyprus. The results provide empirical support for the majority of the hypotheses. Specifically, the results suggest that supervisor support has significant negative impacts on customer verbal aggression, disliked customers, and ambiguous customer expectations. The results further suggest that coworker support alleviates disproportionate and ambiguous customer expectations. Both supervisor and coworker support exert significant effects on emotional exhaustion in the hypothesized directions. With regard to the relationships of the customer-related social stressors with emotional exhaustion, only ambiguous customer expectations have significant positive effects on emotional exhaustion. The rest of the relationships are not supported by the empirical data. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed in the study.

The relationship between customer-related social stressors and job outcomes: the mediating role of emotional exhaustion

“…Turnover intentions were measured via a three-item scale taken from Singh, Verbeke, and Rhoads (1996). Using these items to measure study variables is congruent with past empirical studies (e.g., Karatepe et al, 2010;Kim et al, 2009). …”

“…DCE refers to customers' service expectations that are evaluated as unjustified and sometimes unfair by frontline employees (Dormann & Zapf, 2004). CVA is associated with verbal abuse such as insults and yelling and hostile behaviours displayed at any time (Karatepe et al, 2010). DC is related to hostile, humourless, and unpleasant customers who do not respect frontline employees' work rhythm (Dormann & Zapf, 2004).…”

“…Karatepe et al (2009) showed that CVA exacerbated emotional exhaustion among frontline hotel employees in Northern Cyprus. In a study of frontline bank employees in Northern Cyprus, Karatepe et al (2010) also found that ACE heightened emotional exhaustion. It appears that frontline employees who are faced with dysfunctional customer behaviours and have unpleasant work experiences are emotionally exhausted.…”

“…First, 'the customer is always right' philosophy encourages frontline employees to please the customer at any cost (Karatepe et al, 2010). However, employees with unpleasant work experiences arising from customer-related social stressors are unhappy to serve aggressive customers in service encounters.…”

A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship between Customer Misbehavior and Emotional Labor

“…Grandy (2007) suggests that verbal violations from outside, such as from customers, colleagues or superiors, have an impact on customer sentiment [8]. Results from Karatepe (2010) showed that social pressure from customers will make employees feel emotional exhaustion [9]. In the process of service exchanges, customer misconduct will make employees feel depressed.…”