Daily Customer Mistreatment and Employee Sabotage Against Customers: Examining Emotion and Resource Perspectives

Abstract

Taking emotion and resource perspectives, we examined the daily relationship between customers' mistreatment of employees and employee sabotage of customers, as well as employees' individual- and unit-level emotion-based and resource-based moderators for this relationship. Multilevel analyses of daily survey data from 131 call center employees showed that daily customer mistreatment significantly predicted customer-directed sabotage. In addition, supporting the emotion perspective, employees' negative affectivity exacerbated the effect of customer mistreatment on customer-directed sabotage, whereas employees' self-efficacy for emotional regulation weakened such effect. Further, supporting the resource perspective, job tenure and service rule commitment both weakened the effect of customer mistreatment.