Eye for an eye? Frontline service employee reactions to customer incivility

Abstract

Purpose Frontline service employees (FSEs) face high demands of emotional labor when dealing with difficult, and sometimes even uncivil, customer behavior while attempting to deliver service with a smile. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior. The authors investigate two potential processes – ego threat and perceived interactional justice – and further address boundary conditions of this effect. Design/methodology/approach The data for this paper were collected in three studies: one field experiment and two online experiments using adult samples. Hypotheses were tested and data was analyzed using ANOVA and regression-based modeling approaches. Findings Findings from a field-experimental study and online experiments show that FSEs offer lower service levels to uncivil customers. The authors further find that this effect is mediated by a perceived ego threat and that employees’ regulation of emotion (ROE), as part of their emotional intelligence, attenuates the effect of perceived ego threats on service levels. Research limitations/implications This study finds that perceived ego threat (but not perceived interactional justice) explains why employees respond negatively to uncivil customer behavior. Therefore, it offers an emotion-driven explanation of retaliatory behavior in frontline service contexts. Implications for theories focusing on service value co-destruction and customer incivility are discussed. Practical implications The findings from this research show that ROE attenuates the impact of perceived ego threat on employee retaliatory behavior. Managerial implications include developing and training employees on emotion regulation. Furthermore, managers should identify alternative ways for restoring an employee’s ego after the employee experiences uncivil customer behavior. Originality/value The authors propose and test two processes that can explain why employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior to gain a deeper understanding of which processes, or a combination of the two, drive employee responses. Furthermore, the authors shed insights into boundary conditions and explore when employees are less likely to react to uncivil customer behavior while experiencing ego threat.

Impacts of customer incivility and abusive supervision on employee performance: a comparative study of the pre- and post-COVID-19 periods

“…Researchers assert that stress management programs (e.g., relaxation and mindfulness training) can guard FSEs against customer incivility (Frey-Corders et al 2020 ; Sliter et al 2010 ). Training programs that promote emotion regulation abilities and perspective taking can also help FSEs in understanding the position of customers better and displaying emotions toward them more effectively (Sliter et al 2010 ).…”

“…Second, our mediation analyses failed to consider any potential moderators that strengthened or weakened the effect of interpersonal stressors in the pandemic context. COVID-19 research has shown that FSEs’ emotional intelligence (Frey-Corders et al 2020 ) and resilience (Al-Hawari et al 2020 ) mitigate the deleterious effect of customer incivility. In addition, social capital and network and collaborative knowledge creation have been found to help organizations and individuals effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic (Al-Omoush et al 2020 ; Belso-Martínez et al 2020 ; López-Cabarcos et al 2020 ; Xie et al 2020 ).…”

Infusing tribal reciprocity into service research: towards an integrated and dynamic view of repayment, retaliation and restorative justice for regenerative service ecosystem wellbeing

“…repayment vs retaliation) and in this paper retaliation is seen as a negative reciprocal act, i.e. an eye for an eye (Schieffelin 1980;Frey-Cordes et al 2020).…”

“…retaliation, as well as to the related concept of restorative justice have been neglected. Mostly, these constructs have been investigated in isolation and single-sidedly (Frey-Cordes et al 2020;Greer 2015;Grégoire and Fisher 2006;Jung and Yoo 2017;Lee and Kim 2019a). Furthermore, society has predominantly advanced a Westernised and rather mechanistic view of reciprocity (Weiner 1980;Young 2011) and ignored the dynamic nature of an integrated concept of reciprocity (Chen and Chen 2004;Metge 2002).…”

Uncovering the relationship between customer anger and frontline employees’ recovery performance in the service encounter

“…Second, showing anger breaks the social norm and is particularly unacceptable in Eastern culture, where harmonious relations are extremely valued (Glikson et al, 2019). In such case, employees may feel interactive injustice and get angry at the rude customer (Frey-Cordes et al, 2020;Rupp and Spencer, 2006), resulting in their "negativity reciprocity," that is, returning offensiveness with less effort on work, more incivility and even deliberate undermining (Zhang et al, 2008). Finally, according to the regulatory depletion theory, customer anger as a stressor expends FLEs' cognitive resources, such that they have little mental resources to control their anger and get the job NBRI 12,2 done (Walker et al, 2017).…”