Customer Mistreatment and its Effect on Service Employees’ Well-being

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees’ affective and behavioral outcomes and to examine the spillover and spiraling mechanisms of resource losses. In study 1, I included 93 effect sizes of 80 independent samples from 70 primary studies (N = 24,708). I used a meta-analytic approach to conduct a quantitative review of the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees’ affective and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual- level moderators (i.e., service provider type, mean sample age, percentage of female employees) on these relationships. Furthermore, I compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other work-related stressors (i.e., challenge-related stressors and hindrance-related stressors). The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees’ affective outcomes (i.e., reduced job satisfaction, reduced organizational commitment, and increased stress) and behavioral outcomes (i.e., increased emotional labor, increased surface acting, increased turnover intention, and increased work withdrawal). Additionally, the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees’ organizational commitment is influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e., service provider type). Furthermore, the meta-analysis results show that the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and employee outcomes ranged from moderately small to moderately large. In study 2, adopting a dynamic perspective of resource loss, I examined the spillover mechanism between employees’ emotional exhaustion in the evening and their negative emotions the next morning. Moreover, I tested the spiraling mechanism from service employees’ emotional exhaustion the previous evening to their emotional exhaustion the next evening. The results show that the impact of customer mistreatment on employees’ evening emotional exhaustion spills over to the next day, which leads them to feel negative emotions in the morning. Furthermore, the impact of customer mistreatment on employees’ evening emotional exhaustion triggers their emotional exhaustion spirals, and their evening emotional exhaustion leads to more emotional exhaustion the next evening. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.