The Study On The Mechanism Of Customer Aggression On Employee Turnover Intention

It is showed that service industry gradually acquires a leading position in economic activities according to the new trend of the development of the world service industry. The vast majority of them are emotion-intensive and relationship-oriented. Due to the involvement of customers, the interaction between customers and employees become normal state. The customer is the source of enterprise economic benefits, so Service-oriented organizations generally believe that the customer is always more important, even God is the customers. However, the mantra "The customer is always right," communicates unequal power in the customer-employee relationship; and this power discrepancy is a key component to identify the target for aggression. So, customer aggression becomes an important stressor on service employees. It will cause employee negative attitudes and the counterproductive behavior, eventually led to the customers, employees and enterprises three lose situation. Based on the conservation of resources theory, the research explores what customer aggression effects employee’s attitude and behaviors and how to alleviate the negative behavior of employees. Through the review on turnover, work pressure and other literature, we address these gaps:first, the research of customer aggression is lack of a unified theoretical framework; second, there is lack of research on the mechanism between customer aggression behavior and employee reactions; third, there is the lack of intervention to alleviate employees’negative behaviors due to customer bad behavior.According to the customer involvement behavior on employees of fragmented and the lack of a unified theoretical framework, this study based on the conservation of resources theory, analyzed the nature of service employees’ emotional labor, combined with the dynamic relationship between customer behavior and employee reactions between, integrated the job demands-resources model and affective event model. So, this study put forward a customer aggression-employee reaction model. According to this model, customer aggrssion caused the work pressure. The service employee oftrn have two different paths to deal with the stress. One is emotion-drive path:customer aggerssion lead to employee emotional exhaustion and negative behavior; the other is judge-drive path:when the service employees encounter customer aggression, they regulate emotion actively to reduce resource consumption, prevent or alleviate the negative behaviors.As to the question that what effect and how to alleviate employees’ negative behaviors by customer aggression behaviors, this article gave empirical tests for the employees’reaction to confirm the model through two sub-studies. The first study examined the impact of customers’ verbal aggression on employees’ turnover intention and the mediating role of employees’ emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, we analyzed the moderating effect of a team climate for Perceived Organizational Support (POS) on the relationship between customers’ verbal aggression and employees’ emotional exhaustion. Interviews and questionnaires were employed to collect data from1,112employees from a call center in central China. Finally, the data were analyzed and the hypotheses were tested via descriptive analysis and hierarchical linear modeling analysis using SPSS and HLM, respectively. The results show:first, customers’ verbal aggression significantly predicted employees’ turnover intention; second, employees’ emotional exhaustion fully mediated the relationship between customers’ verbal aggression and employees’ turnover intention; third, the positive association of customers’verbal aggression and employees’ emotional exhaustion was weaker for teams that perceived higher levels of emotional POS, but not instrumental POS.The second empirical study examined several relationships pertaining to customer aggression, employee emotional labor strategies, turnover intention and the moderating role of Psychological Capital (PsyCap). Two hundred and thirty front-line workers of call centers in south China completed a two-phase survey almost one-month period. Results of hierarchical linear models revealed that employee turnover intention increased when an employee encountered customer aggression; however, both surface acting and deep acting mediated this effect. Results also revealed that employees who possess higher levels of PsyCap engage in more deep acting and less surface acting. Further, turnover intention reduced when employees possessed high levels PsyCap.According to the results of empirical study one and two, we put forward interventions to reduce or eliminate effects of customer aggression on employee turnover intention.Organizational support is the external resources, while the psychological capital is the internal resource. The employee turnover intention can slow down through the strengthening of external resources and development of internal resources in practice. Especially the psychological capital is an active variable, and its greatest feature is the "state-like", that is, it can be cultivate and develop. Therefore, based on group dynamics theory, team-level psychological capital appreciation model is feasible.