Suchergebnisse

Research indicates that a customer's service experience is shaped by their past experiences with the firm. However, the extent to which past experiences with customers shape frontline service employees' delivery of services has not been examined. We propose that the analysis of service encounters as discrete, independent units ignores possible linkages between customer experiences via frontline employees. Adopting a resource spill-over perspective across two studies, we find that employees' experience of customer mistreatment compromised their subsequent service delivery. Using an experiment in Study 1, we find that these effects are mediated by changes in the employee's self-control capacity. Using a field sample in Study 2, we find that these effects are moderated by the employee's dispositional self-control capacity and their motivation to commit to display rules. Our findings show how service encounter outcomes can be shaped by distal service events and call for a more holistic understanding of the forces that shape service encounter outcomes. In particular, by highlighting the potential consequences, our findings challenge conventional work protocols that compel employees to persevere despite their experience of mistreatment. By detailing the mediating and moderating mechanisms of mistreatment spill-over in service organizations, we highlight the recovery mechanisms and practices that enable FLEs to remain resilient despite negative encounters with customers.

Withdrawal from work by frontline employees (FLEs) is generally perceived by managers as counterproductive or anti-service behavior. However, there may be detrimental effects of continuing to provide a service, particularly after an FLE has experienced incivility. The possible beneficial effects of withdrawal on frontline service employees' well-being have rarely been investigated. In this article, we conducted two studies to examine the moderating role of on- and off-task withdrawal behaviors on the relationship between customer incivility and employees' emotional exhaustion. In Study 1, we examined parking officers' reactions to customer incivility. We found support for the role of off-task withdrawal as a resource-replenishing strategy, which mitigated the relationship between customer incivility and emotional exhaustion. In Study 2, we examined a sample of nurses in a large hospital to compare the replenishing potential of both on-task and off-task withdrawal strategies. We found that off-task withdrawal served a replenishing function, while on-task withdrawal aggravated nurses' feeling of emotional exhaustion as a result of customer incivility. These results highlight different resource implications, including recovery benefits of short-term withdrawal behaviors at work, and provide important theoretical and practical implications for the management of customer incivility and frontline service employees' well-being and performance.