Research On The Formation Mechanism Of Customer Incivility Based On The Perspective Of Employees

As a kind of customer mistreatment,the present literatures about customer incivility(CI)are focused on its negative effects,but little on its antecedents,which means its formation mechanism still needs to be further explored.The researches have proved that the customer incivility not only affect the employees' mental health but also expand the negative effects to the organizational level,which is the last thing service enterprises want to see.In addition,there is a survey shows that more than 70% of customers end their interactions with the service employees with negative emotions,and the occurrence of customer incivility tends to be increasingly frequent.In this context,only by studying the antecedents of customer incivility,the negative influence can be reduced or alleviated fundamentally.Based on the analysis of the existing literatures,this study explored the influencing process from employees' emotional labor to customer incivility by the perspective of employee.Drawing on the sociometer theory,we verified the mediating role of customers' self-esteem threat and the moderating role of the customer perceived service climate.This study mainly explores:(1)the direct effects of surface acting and deep acting on customer incivility;(2)the mediating role of customer self-esteem threat between surface acting and customer incivility,and the role between deep acting and customer incivility;(3)the moderating effect of customer perceived service climate on the relationship between surface acting and customer selfesteem threat,and the effect on the relationship between deep acting and customer selfesteem threat;(4)the moderated mediate effect from emotional labor to customer incivility through customer self-esteem threat.In this study,survey research methodology and horizontal research design were used to collect the paired data of service employees and customers at the same time.We tested our hypotheses using the data collected from the service enterprises in Nanchang,Guangzhou,Shanghai,Shenzhen and other places,and a total of 317 pairs of employeecustomer paired data were effectively recovered.In the process of data processing,we first did the reliability and validity of each scale we used.Then we test the common method variance in this study.After that,the correlation analysis was used to preliminarily examine the correlations between each variable.Finally,using the hierarchical regression to test the moderate effects of customer perceived service climate and mediate effects of customer self-esteem threat respectively.The results supported most of our hypotheses.It shows that: employees' surface acting has a significant positive impact on CI,while the deep acting has a negative impact on CI;customer self-esteem threat plays a partly mediating role in the relationship between surface acting and CI,while customer self-esteem threat plays a partly mediating role in the relationship between surface acting and CI,there was a positive correlation between customer self-esteem threat and CI;customer perceived service climate plays a moderating role in the relationship between deep acting and customer self-esteem threat,but the moderating effect between surface acting and customer self-esteem threat is not significant;additionally,the moderated mediating effects in the relationship between the deep acting and customer incivility through customer self-esteem threat is also supported.Based on the above analyses,our research conclusions can provide certain practical implications for managers and service-oriented organizations.Firstly,enterprises should realize the emotional labor of employees plays an essential role in the service interaction,because the deep acting and surface acting will have different influences on customers.This requires organizations to motivate employees to provide sincere and reliable service,which may reduce the occurrence of customer incivility.Secondly,the managers and organizations should clear the contingency effects of customer perceived service climate on the relationship between emotional labor and customer self-esteem threat,they need to build positive and strong service climate as much as possible to make customers feel more valuable,then finally achieved the goal of reducing the occurrence of customer incivility and the negative impacts of customer incivility.