Returning good for evil: A study of customer incivility and extra-role customer service

By Julie N. Y. Zhu, L. W. Lam, Jennifer Y. M. Lai. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2019

102 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study investigates the conditions under which service employees can react positively after encountering customer incivility. Building on the work engagement theory, we hypothesize that customer incivility interacts with workplace social support (i.e., perceived supervisor and co-worker support) to influence work engagement, which in turn leads to extra-role customer service. We test our model within the context of hotels. The results of a two-wave survey with a sample of 198 frontline service employees provide support for most of the hypotheses. In particular, the findings show that employees encountering uncivil customer interactions provide extra-role customer service only when they have high (vs. low) supervisor support. Work engagement mediates the conditional effect of customer incivility on extra-role customer service. The results thus suggest that supervisors play a vital role in encouraging employees’ positive reaction toward customer incivility. This work has notable implications for hospitality management research.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b4a580b773638ad7472b8203c7c310b74b27aff

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Kate L. Daunt
2. Avraam Papastathopoulos
3. Christos Koritos
4. Achilleas Boukis

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Kate L. Daunt
2. Avraam Papastathopoulos
3. Christos Koritos
4. Achilleas Boukis

Citations in the corpus

• Effects of customer incivility on frontline employees and the moderating role of supervisor leadership style (2020, background): “Supervisor support is defined as the extent to which immediate supervisors show an active interest in their role and value their subordinates’ contribution (Eisenberger et al., 2002; Zhu et al., 2019).”