Research On The Effect Of Customer Unfairness On Employees’Counterproductive Work Behavior:the Mediating Role Of Emotional Exhaustion And Moderating Role Of Identification

Employees’ counterproductive work behavior has been paid more and more attention in recent years. It often can bring many negative impacts to the organization and harm the interests of the organization. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce employee counterproductive work behavior for the long-term development of organizations. Through the review of relevant literature on counterproductive work behavior and combining with front-line service context, we find that some kinds of customers’ behaviors, such as customer unfairness, will affect front-line employees’counterproductive work behavior. Customers are stakeholders who come from outside for service organizations and their inappropriate behaviors will affect employees’ behavior, even including extreme retaliation. It is necessary to explore the influencing mechanism of customer unfairness on employees’ counterproductive work behavior. The conservation of resource theory provides a new perspective for us. This paper views emotion as an important resource in the process of work and explain the influencing mechanism of customer unfairness on employees’ counterproductive work behavior from the perspective of consumption of emotional resource. In addition, is there difference among different employees when customer unfairness happens? It is meaningful to explore these questions from the point of organizational identification and occupational identification. It is helpful for us to find out the boundary condition that customer unfairness affects employees’ counterproductive work behavior and thereby to reduce employees’ counterproductive work behavior caused by customer unfairness.Based on the conservation of resource theory, this paper builds a research framework from customer unfairness to employees’ counterproductive work behavior and explores the effect of customer unfairness on employees’ counterproductive work behavior (including counterproductive work behavior directed to organizations and individuals respectively). At the same time, it examines the mediating role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship. The moderating roles of organizational identification and occupational identification in the relationship between customer unfairness and emotional exhaustion of employees are also examined. It uses paired data collected from 171 service employees and 41 immediate supervisors to examine hypotheses. The results show that:(1) customer unfairness is related to employee counterproductive work behavior positively, (2) emotional exhaustion plays a full mediating role in the relationship between customer unfairness and employee counterproductive work behavior directed to the organization, (3) organizational identification moderated the relationship between customer unfairness and emotional exhaustion negatively, that is, the relationship between customer unfairness and emotional exhaustion is weaker for employees who identify the organization more deeply.The innovations of this study are:(1) it analyzes the mechanism that customer affects employees’ counterproductive work behavior and finds out the mediating role of emotional exhaustion. Unlike existing studies, this paper views the emotional resource consumption as an explaining mechanism. It expands the emotion-centered model proposed by research on dependent variables of counterproductive work behavior. (2) this paper also explores the factor influencing the mechanism of customer unfairness. It analyzes the moderating role of organizational identification and occupational identification in the relationship between customer unfairness and emotional exhaustion. The result confirms the negative moderating role of organizational identification. It deepens our understanding of the positive moderating role of organizational identification. It also enriches the study on the boundary that service employees experience emotional exhaustion in the context of service.Besides, it indicates some practical significance. First of all, service enterprises should help employees to realize that customer unfairness is inevitable, but they can deal with it by some effective ways. Secondly, service enterprises should pay more attention to employees’ emotion and help employees to regain the normal emotion state. At last, managers can encourage employees to identify the organization to weaken the negative effects of customer unfairness.