The Role of Service Providers’ Resilience in Buffering the Negative Impact of Customer Incivility on Service Recovery Performance

Abstract

In the service sector, customer-related social stressors may weaken employees’ well-being, impairing job-related outcomes. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory and on the psychology of sustainability, fostering personal resources become critical to encourage service providers who can effectively manage such job demands. This study investigated how customer-related social stressors and customer orientation influence service recovery performance and whether resilience buffers the negative effects of customer incivility on service recovery performance. One hundred and fifty-seven Italian customer-contact employees completed a questionnaire analyzing customer incivility, customer-related social stressors, resilience, customer orientation, and service recovery performance. Regression analyses and SEMs were conducted. Although all customer-related social stressors indirectly and negatively influenced service recovery performance by increasing burnout symptoms, customer incivility only exerted a direct and detrimental impact on service recovery performance. Customer orientation was directly and positively associated with service recovery performance. Highly resilient employees were less affected by variations in service recovery performance across customer incivility levels. Within the psychology of sustainability framework, promoting resilient workplaces is crucial to foster healthy and sustainable work settings. Service organizations can greatly benefit from providing their employees with psychological resilience training programs, cultivating high customer-oriented attitudes through mentoring sessions, and hiring highly customer-oriented and resilient employees for customer-contact occupations.

The Impact of Customer Mistreatment on Employee Displaced Aggression: The Moderating Effect of Interpersonal Sensitivity and Moral Identity

“…Third, the management should institute a formal written zero-tolerance policy for customer mistreatment, distinguishing reasonable from unreasonable customers’ demands ( Choi et al, 2014 ). Furthermore, managers should ensure that they are providing quality customer services, and they are soliciting frequent feedbacks from clients to detect service failures ( Sommovigo et al, 2019a ).…”

“…Moral education could strengthen their moral concepts, consolidate their inner moral standards, promote the consistency of their own behaviors, and reduce the occurrence of immoral behaviors. Meanwhile, psychological resilience training programs ( Meiklejohn et al, 2012 ) aimed at improving employees’ skills to face customer interactions, respond to customers’ requests, and foster service providers’ emotion regulation skills, coping strategies, and relational management skills ( Sommovigo et al, 2019a ).…”

“…Based on the conservation of resources (CORs) theory, as a stressor in employees’ working environment, customer mistreatment often consumes a large amount of psychological resources of employees, causing psychological pressure, negative emotions, and emotional exhaustion, impairing employee well-being ( Sommovigo et al, 2019b ), as well as affecting their physical and mental health ( Almeida, 2005 ; Grandey et al, 2007 ). These negative effects may further lead to higher generalized customer-directed incivility intentions ( Sommovigo et al, 2020 ), lower service recovery performance ( Sommovigo et al, 2019a ), and unethical behaviors of employees, such as service sabotage and displaced aggressive behaviors ( Wang et al, 2011 ; Koopmann et al, 2015 ; Liu et al, 2015 ), which will have adverse effects on service relationship and enterprises operation.…”

The Effectiveness of Customer Participation and Affective Misforecasting in Online Post-Recovery Satisfaction

“…In contrast, emotional participation describes customers' emotional labor in the recovery process, which means that even when experiencing a service failure, customers should use self-regulation to show courtesy and patience to the service provider and form positive expectations for the service outcome instead of expressing anger and frustration [25,48]. These self-regulation behaviors indicate that customers need to consume many emotional resources to deal with their negative emotions, which are caused by the failure experiences; thus, customers may feel that the expectations and requirements of such emotional expression exceed their ability and motivation [49,50], and such customers may experience a sense of overload and pressure from the participation process, resulting in lower service satisfaction [17,50,51]. Thus, emotional participation negatively affects post-recovery satisfaction, and the following hypothesis was proposed:…”

Психологічні Особливості Роботи У Клієнтській Підтримці

“…Говорячи про шляхи розвʼязання психологічних проблем, що виникають у працівників клієнтської підтримки (стрес, емоційне вигорання, емоційне напруження тощо) Соммовіго В., Сетті И. та Арджентеро П. наголошують на важливості таких властивостей працівника, як резільєнтність та орієнтованість на клієнта як важливих ресурсів копінгу. Разом з тим важливе значення надається організаційному ресурсу -створенню атмосфери, що підтримує, супервізії [4].…”