Not My Circus, Not my Monkeys? Frontline Employee Perceptions of Customer Deviant Behaviors and Service Firms’ Guardianship Policies

Abstract

Recent disruptions, labor shortages, and fiscal pressures, especially in retail service environments, have necessitated and highlighted changes in the roles and responsibilities of frontline employees, often requiring them to enforce mask mandates and police customer deviant behavior (CDB). While extant work has investigated the impact of policing, or guardianship, for customers and firms, there has been limited examination regarding the policies themselves and the corresponding toll exacted upon frontline employees (FLEs) and their managers (FLMs). Thus, this phenomenon warranted an in-depth, multi-method investigation, including a full-scale qualitative exploration substantiated and extended via three experiments and a survey. The qualitative approach probes employees’ feelings about and identifies categories of CDB in retail service settings as well as develops a novel typology of guardianship policies (policy type x approach style). The subsequent studies empirically test the CDB guardianship typology in the context of a particularly detrimental type of CDB—shoplifting, while advancing understanding of firm-related (guardianship expectations), employee-related (trait anxiety) and job role-related (FLE vs FLM) contextual factors impacting perceptions of policy fairness and turnover intentions. The findings provide rich insights for practitioners and scholars by offering a novel guardianship typology and an extensive agenda for future research.

A Q&A primer and systematic review of meta-analytic reporting in organizational frontline service research

“…Specifically, we consider extant service work that expressly highlights the role of frontline employees (FLEs), or boundary-spanning service personnel (Good et al. , 2023) “who serve as primary points of contact between firms and customers” (Fennell et al. , 2023, p. 1).…”

FLEs' concerns with misbehaving customers in the time of COVID and beyond

“…customers has received almost no attention, according to Habel et al. (2017) and Fennell et al. (2023).…”

“…Bitner et al, 1994;Reynolds, 2003, 2004;Lovelock, FLEs' concerns with misbehaving customers 771 1994), research focused on FLEs' enforcement of company rules on, e.g. customers has received almost no attention, according to Habel et al (2017) and Fennell et al (2023). Thus, there is an important gap in the academic literature, even though the topic of misbehaving customers' effects on FLEs and their need to enforce the rules during the pandemic was covered extensively in the trade publications (e.g.…”