Customer Misbehavior: An Exploration Of The Consequence On Frontline Employees

This paper chose service personnel who directly contact with customers as theresearch object; data were collected from12industries using questionnaires toinvestigate the impact of customer misbehavior on staffs in the service encounters, andto discuss the effect of the organizational supportive atmosphere and organizationalinteractional justice in the process. The study found that customer misbehavior mayhave a negative impact on staffs’ emotion, attitude and behavior. It may also enhanceemotional exhaustion, lower job satisfaction, and negatively impact job performance.However, perceived organizational support and interactional justice were able tomitigate its adverse impact on the staffs to a certain extent. At the same time, everythinghas two sides. Although customer misbehavior has many negative effects, it also hassome positive aspects. When customer misbehavior happens, it may expose theshortages of the organization. It just looks like a keen monitoring system which canreflect the organizations’ problems. When staffs suffer from customer misbehaviorcaused by organizations ’own vulnerability, it is possible for the organizations to makeimprovements. This paper explores the role of organizational support and interactionaljustice in the process. These concerns have academic and practical value. First,researches of situational factors of customer misbehavior and its positive aspects haveonly just begun; many scholars have called for more researches in these areas. Secondly,customer misbehavior has become more serious, enterprises need to take some measuresto minimize its adverse effects in the event, and they can also take the opportunities tomanagement the organizations’ shortages. An understanding of the positive aspects ofcustomer misbehavior and the effects of organizational support and organizationaljustice in the mechanism will help relieving the negative effects when staffs face themisbehavior of customers, and enterprises can learn from the experience. The papertested the hypnoses by structural equation model, and implications for management andfuture research are discussed.