Huang, Miaojia; Amarnani, Rajiv; To, March; Yeo, Gillian

Customer mistreatment— low-quality interpersonal treatment employees receive from their customers — is a prevalent and problematic occurrence. A substantial literature has demonstrated that employees who report more frequent customer mistreatment tend to subsequently show lower levels of performance toward customers in general as well as to subsequent customers. Targets of frequent customer mistreatment also report ongoing and sustained burnout. These studies have established that targets of frequent customer mistreatment over a specific period of time tend to show more negative behaviors in general, but surprisingly little is known about how targets of customer mistreatment react in the actual moment of mistreatment–how do targets of customer mistreatment treat the very perpetrator of their mistreatment during the mistreatment event? That is, we know little about how targets of customer mistreatment behave toward their specific perpetrator, and how these behaviors are potentially informed by the characteristics of the perpetrator. This study aims to bring the perpetrator into the picture in customer mistreatment events: how do characteristics of the perpetrator inform what happens in a customer mistreatment event? Drawing on social information processing (SIP) theory, we focus on the perpetrator’s social status as an especially salient customer characteristic known to shape the service encounter. Building on principles of SIP theory, we propose that high-status perpetrators of customer mistreatment receive more perspective-taking and ultimately more help from targets of customer mistreatment on the one hand, but also instigate more job-related stigma and job-related shame in the moment for the focal employee on the other hand. We tested our proposed parallel mediation model using the critical incident technique based on customer mistreatment events reported by service employees. Our study contributes to the extant literature in two ways. Firstly, this study extends customer mistreatment research by examining customer mistreatment from an event perspective. Existing research has focused exclusively on the entity perspective of customer mistreatment which measured the employee’s frequency of customer mistreatment over a specific time and across many different situations and only tells us the employee’s reactions toward customers in general. The event perspective of customer mistreatment, however, examines a specific customer mistreatment episode, which enables us to understand the employee’s immediate reaction toward the perpetrator. Secondly, we advanced the literature by bringing the customer characteristic into the picture rather than focusing on the employee’s individual differences, which dominated the entity perspective of customer mistreatment literature.

1. Understand the two main streams of customer mistreatment literature: entity-based and event-based perspectives.
2. Apply the principles of the critical incident technique to comprehend the impact of customer mistreatment events on employee perpetrator-directed outcomes.
3. Evaluate the role of perpetrator characteristics, specifically social status, in shaping employee immediate reactions during customer mistreatment episodes.