Research On The Impact Of Customer Mistreatment Behavior On Employees’ Time Banditry

Time is not only precious and limited,but also non-renewable.In organizations,employees are always expected to produce as much output as possible in their limited working hours.But the reality is that employees also engage in private affairs or busy with personal interests during work,which delays many working hours.These behaviors are called time banditry.In order to prevent these behaviors effectively,scholars have carried out a lot of research on its factors,but ignored a type of customer behavior—customer mistreatment behavior.Customer mistreatment behavior,as a negative event frequently encountered by employees in the workplace,affects employees’ self-regulation ability,emotional response,and actions.To this end,we try to link mistreatment behavior to employee time banditry.Based on conservation of resource theory,we explore the effect of customer mistreatment behavior on time banditry from the perspective of ego depletion,and investigate the mediating role of job embeddedness.In order to make a contribution to the organization human resource management practice.Firstly,this paper systematically reviews the domestic and foreign researches about customer mistreatment behavior,time banditry,ego depletion and job embeddedness,as well as puts forward the research hypothesis of this paper based on conservation of resource theory.Secondly,we further modified the scale to ensure our scale accurately reflects the conditions and context faced by employees in China.The questionnaire of this study was designed according to the revised scale.A total of 432 valid questionnaires were obtained by sending electronic questionnaires through WeChat.SPSS26.0 was used for preliminary analysis of data,which confirmed the good reliability of the measurement scale.In combination with Mplus7.4 software,structural equation was used for confirmatory factor analysis,which ensured that the variables had a good discrimination validity.Correlation analysis and hypothesis test were further completed.The result shows that:(1)Customer mistreatment has a significant positive effect on employee ego depletion and time banditry behavior;(2)In the process of the effect of customer mistreatment on employees’ time banditry behavior,the mediating effect of ego depletion is significant;(3)The level of employee job embeddedness positively moderates the relationship between customer mistreatment and employee ego depletion.Finally,the three-point contributions of the research are summarized.First,enrich the factors of time banditry,verify the impact of customer mistreatment behavior on time banditry,and help organizational managers better understand the motivation of employees to implement time banditry.Second,creating a new perspective on the influence of customer mistreatment behavior on time banditry by using ego depletion as a mediator variable.Third,job embeddedness,which represents the dependency relationship between employees and the organization,is taken as the mediating role to reveal the "dark side" of job embeddedness,deepen the understanding of the regulating effect of job embeddedness,and provide a theoretical basis for enterprises to pay attention to the cultivation of high-job embeddedness employees.