How emotional regulation and conscientiousness break the reciprocal circle between customer mistreatment and surface acting: an experience sampling study

Purpose Drawing on the conservation of resource theory and emotional contagion perspective, this study aims to propose that customer mistreatment has an indirect effect on subsequent customer mistreatment by triggering high levels of surface acting. In other words, there is a vicious circle formed as a result of customer mistreatment and surface acting. This paper further argues that emotional regulation and conscientiousness are effective in breaking this vicious circle. Design/methodology/approach An experience sampling study was conducted on 97 frontline service employees in a hotel chain’s restaurants in China, with two daily surveys for ten consecutive days. Multilevel path analyses were used to test the hypotheses. Findings The results indicate that employees experiencing customer mistreatment in the morning would adopt the surface acting strategy more frequently in the afternoon, which in turn induces more customer mistreatment in the afternoon. Further, this indirect effect can be mitigated by high (versus low) levels of emotional regulation and conscientiousness. Originality/value Recently, there has been growing recognition of the vital links between customer mistreatment and negative employee outcomes. However, these studies have failed to consider the carryover effect of customer mistreatment. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first pioneer study on whether and how customer mistreatment can affect subsequent instances of customer mistreatment, thereby offering a more comprehensive understanding of the consequences of customer mistreatment.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management

• Publication date

  2022-06-08

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1108/ijchm-09-2021-1102
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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