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Abstract
Customer mistreatment represents a growing issue for service industries. Previous research has established that customer mistreatment leads to a variety of negative psychological states upon service employees. Therefore, service employees are motivated to adopt different strategies to cope with these negative states. However, given the variety of negative states customer mistreatment can breed, it is not clear which one of them is motivating service employees’ certain coping behaviors. This dissertation examined the complexity and nuance of how service employees can cope with customer mistreatment, as well as the underlying mechanisms responsible for these coping behaviors. In the first and second studies, I examined how service employees cope with negative mood generated by customer mistreatment. Based on negative state relief model, I hypothesized that service employees can cope with customer mistreatment by using helping behaviors. In the third study, I focused on service employees’ coping towards the need of emotion regulation due to customer mistreatment. More specifically, based on resource depletion theory, I hypothesized that incidental customer mistreatment would make service employees get less favorable evaluation from the subsequent customer, and this effect is due to service employees’ engagement of surface acting. In the fourth study, I extend the conclusion of third study towards a long term context. Building on previous emotional labor literature, I tested whether employees’ long-term engagement of emotion regulation would influence their display of counterproductive behaviors as well as organizational citizenship behaviors. Results of these studies generally support the idea that service employees may cope with customer mistreatment in different ways across different contexts. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.