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Grounded in the conservation of resources theory, this study proposes the mechanisms and conditions under which customer mistreatment affects employee proactive behavior. This study focuses on insomnia as a mediating mechanism and resilience as a boundary condition for the indirect effect of customer mistreatment on employee proactive behavior via insomnia.

We conducted a single survey in two phases, with a time lag of three weeks, among 302 frontline South Korean employees. The data collected from these two points were then analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis and the PROCESS macro.

The findings demonstrated that there was a significant negative relationship between customer mistreatment and employee proactive behavior, and this relationship was mediated by insomnia. Furthermore, the results revealed that resilience moderates both the effect of customer mistreatment on insomnia and the indirect effect of customer mistreatment on employee proactive behavior through insomnia.

This research primarily focuses on Korean frontline workers, potentially limiting cultural generalizability. The reliance on self-reported data may introduce common method bias. Future studies should diversify participant demographics and utilize multi-source feedback to validate findings. Grounded in the Conservation of Resource Theory, this study underscores the neglected linkage between customer mistreatment and proactive behavior, especially in frontline employees. We introduce insomnia as a pivotal mediator, deepening our understanding of why mistreatment dampens proactivity. Additionally, we spotlight the role of resilience, revealing its buffering effect against mistreatment’s adverse outcomes.

Organizations should be aware of the detrimental effects of customer mistreatment on frontline employees, as it can hamper proactive behavior, primarily through the exacerbation of insomnia. Implementing resilience-training programs can be a proactive step, offering frontline staff tools to buffer against such negative outcomes. Managers are encouraged to recognize and address instances of customer mistreatment and prioritize employee well-being, which in turn can foster a more proactive and resilient workforce, enhancing organizational performance and customer satisfaction.

This study underscores the broader societal challenge of customer mistreatment in the service sector, highlighting its ripple effects on employee well-being and proactive behavior. It sheds light on the importance of fostering respectful interactions in public and private spaces, emphasizing mutual respect between customers and service providers. Recognizing the adverse impacts of mistreatment can prompt societal discourse on workplace ethics and encourage organizations to advocate for their employees' rights. Ultimately, nurturing a culture that condemns customer mistreatment can lead to healthier work environments, benefitting both employees and society at large.

This study presents a novel approach by investigating the impact of customer mistreatment on employee proactive behavior, considering insomnia as a mediator, a perspective that has received limited attention in existing literature. Additionally, it introduces the concept of resilience as a moderator, offering fresh insights into how individual resilience levels can affect the relationship between customer mistreatment and proactive behavior. The research goes beyond traditional analyses of workplace dynamics to explore the broader implications of these interactions on personal well-being and sleep patterns. Through the application of a moderated-mediation framework, this study enhances understanding of complex organizational behavior dynamics, particularly in the service sector, and provides valuable implications for both theoretical understanding and practical application.

In this chapter, we summarize and build on the current state of the customer mistreatment literature in an effort to further future research on this topic. First, we detail the four primary conceptualizations of customer mistreatment. Second, we present a multilevel model of customer mistreatment, which distinguishes between the unfolding processes at the individual employee level and the service encounter level. In particular, we consider the antecedents and outcomes unique to each level of analysis as well as mediators and moderators. Finally, we discuss important methodological concerns and recommendations for future research.

Drawing on affect-based mechanisms, this chapter describes two forms of customer mistreatment, aggressive and demanding mistreatment. Tests are conducted of their lagged effects in predicting within-person fluctuation of employees’ negative mood, as well as the moderating roles of employees’ emotion regulation after work (i.e., rumination and social sharing). 1,185 daily surveys were collected from 149 Chinese customer service representatives from a call center for eight weekdays. Results supported the main effects of both forms of customer mistreatment and partly supported the moderating roles of rumination in strengthening the impacts of customer mistreatment. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Existing research tends to conceptualize age- and gender-based discrimination as distinct and unrelated social phenomena. A growing body of scholarship, however, highlights the importance of conceptualizing ageism as potentially gendered, and gender discrimination as inherently shaped by age. Using an intersectional theoretical perspective, this chapter examines how gender and age combine to shape women’s and men’s experiences of workplace mistreatment.

The data are obtained from the U.S. General Social Survey. The analysis begins with descriptive statistics, showing how rates of perceived age and gender mistreatment vary for men and women of different age groups. Multivariate logistic regressions follow.

Experiences of workplace mistreatment are significantly shaped by both gender and age. Among both men and women, workers in their 30s and 40s report relatively low levels of perceived age-based discrimination, compared to older or younger workers. It is precisely during this interval of relatively low rates of perceived age-based discrimination that women’s (but not men’s) perceptions of gender-based mistreatment rises dramatically. At all ages, women are significantly more likely to face either gender- or age-based discrimination than men, but the gap is especially large among workers in their 40s.

Women tend to perceive age- and gender-based mistreatment at different times of life, but a concurrent examination of gender- and age-based mistreatment reveals that women’s working lives are characterized by high rates of mistreatment throughout their careers, in a way that men’s are not. The results highlight the importance of conceptualizing gender and age as intersecting systems of inequality.

Contextual factors play a vital role in employee mistreatment. This chapter deals with the definition and scope of contextual factors, including a distinction between the objective environment and its idiosyncratic perception by employees. Several mechanisms are offered to explain the effects of context on mistreatment, including the stressor–strain framework, interaction with personal characteristics, and also mistreatment acting as a stressor. The framework suggested in this chapter uses levels of analysis, and proposes that the objective environment (group level variables) is perceived at the individual level, which consequently leads to both perpetrated and received mistreatment. Those same objective environment variables also have a direct effect on mistreatment, as well as a moderating role in the relationship between individually perceived context and mistreatment. Furthermore, there is some evidence that mistreatment acts as a contextual variable in and of itself, with perpetrators, victims, and bystanders perceiving mistreatment in their workplace and reporting higher levels of stressors and strains. Finally, we outline the need for more longitudinal, multi-level studies to clearly discern the role of context in employee mistreatment.

The modern workplace contains many physical and interpersonal hazards to employee physical and psychological health/well-being. This chapter integrates the literatures on occupational safety (i.e., accidents and injuries) and mistreatment (physical violence and psychological abuse). A model is provided linking environmental (climate and leadership), individual differences (demographics and personality), motivation, behavior, and outcomes. It notes that some of the same variables have been linked to both safety and mistreatment, such as safety climate, mistreatment climate, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.

This chapter summarizes a meta-analysis of 72 studies (N= 20,701) that link customer mistreatment (abusive, nasty, and rude behavior of customers toward employees) to psychological, attitudinal, and behavioral strains. Results showed that customer mistreatment related significantly to a variety of psychological and attitudinal strains (emotional exhaustion, emotional strain, job (dis)satisfaction, turnover intentions, perceived organizational support, and supervisor support) and behavioral strains (reduced customer service performance and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) directed toward organizations and customers). These results were similar to those found with general mistreatment, suggesting that mistreatment by organizational outsiders might have similar effects to mistreatment from organizational insiders. These results suggest a clear association of mistreatment with strains, but recent work is discussed that questions the typical assumption that mistreatment leads to CWB rather than the reverse.

Past research has primarily focused on the negative impact of workplace mistreatment or aggression on the individuals involved, workgroups, and organizations. Certain circumstances, however, create paradoxical effects in which mistreatment positively relates to desirable workplace outcomes and characteristics at the individual and/or organizational level. Reviewing the theoretical and empirical evidence of beneficial outcomes provides researchers and practitioners with a more comprehensive understanding of the progression of workplace mistreatment, allowing them to target specific mechanisms to mitigate detrimental effects and potentially discover important avenues that lead to desired outcomes. A qualitative review of 13 articles demonstrated that different forms of aggression such as bullying, abusive supervision, incivility, and ostracism have positive relationships with paradoxical outcomes and characteristics such as resilience, prosocial behaviors, socially desirable behaviors, job performance, job satisfaction, and creativity. The authors caution against leveraging mistreatment as a method for producing these desired outcomes; instead, the authors encourage researchers and practitioners to utilize the information to further their understanding of the nomological network of workplace mistreatment and its underlying mechanisms, such as cognitive reappraisal and social learning.

Although service researchers have long suggested that customer mistreatment adversely impacts service employees' outcomes, statistical integration of current empirical findings has been lacking. This meta-analysis aims to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

The authors included 221 effect sizes of 135 independent samples from 119 primary studies (N = 47,964). The authors used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively review the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-analysis structural equation modeling was used to explore the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual-level moderators (i.e. service provider type and service delivery mode) on these relationships. Furthermore, we compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other organizational-related factors on some commonly measured employee outcomes.

The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. negative emotions), attitudinal outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. job performance, surface acting and emotional labor). Additionally, service employees' negative emotions mediate the association between customer mistreatment and employees' job satisfaction, turnover intention, surface acting and emotional labor. Furthermore, the relationships between customer mistreatment and service employees' negative emotions and job performance are influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e. service delivery mode).

The authors contribute to the literature by providing robust meta-analytic estimates of the effects of customer mistreatment on a variety of service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the different magnitudes of the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and other job-related and personality-related factors by quantifying the true variability of the effect sizes. The authors draw on current theories underpinning customer mistreatment to test a theoretical model of the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. service employees' negative emotions) on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The authors explore the effects of two contextual-level factors (i.e. service provider types and service delivery mode) related to the service delivery context that may account for the variability of effect sizes across empirical studies.

Despite extensive research on the detrimental work-related impact of customer mistreatment, there has been limited investigation into the outcomes that encompass both positive and negative connotations (i.e. unethical pro-organizational behavior [UPB]). This study aims to test whether, how and when daily customer mistreatment leads to hospitality employees’ daily UPB.

This study conducted a two-phase daily diary study. In the first phase, participants completed measures of their sense of power and provided demographic information. During the subsequent two-week period, participants completed questionnaires twice daily. The analysis included data from 87 hospitality employees, with 781 surveys remaining. This study performed multilevel analyses using Monte–Carlo simulations.

This study revealed that hospitality employees experiencing daily customer mistreatment exhibited heightened perceptions of status threats, resulting in increased daily UPB. The moderating effects of employees’ sense of power were found to be significant in both direct and indirect relationships.

Hospitality managers should recognize that customer mistreatment can threaten employees’ social status and result in daily UPB. To protect employees, implementing daily training programs is essential. Moreover, hotels and managers should provide HR management/recognition programs and empowerment initiatives to boost employees’ sense of power and counteract the harmful effects of customer mistreatment on their status.

This study makes contributions to the existing literature on customer mistreatment by establishing a positive relationship between daily customer mistreatment and daily UPB through the mechanism of status threat. Furthermore, thise study highlights the importance of enhancing hospitality employees’ sense of power as a protective factor against the negative consequences of customer mistreatment.