Rude customers and service performance: roles of motivation and personality

ABSTRACT

On the basis of the self-determination theory, we develop and test an integrative framework that explains when and why customer incivility impairs employee service performance. Using multisource data collected through two waves in a shopping mall, we found that the strength of the mediated relationship between customer incivility and employee service performance (via employee intrinsic motivation) varied based on employee core-self evaluations; the negative indirect effect of customer incivility via intrinsic motivation on service performance was weaker for employees with high levels of core-self evaluations than for employees with low levels of core-self evaluations.

摘要

基于自决理论，我们提出并检验了一个综合模型，用于解释顾客不文明行为为何会损害员工的服务绩效以及这一效应发生的情境。我们在一个购物中心收集了跨越两个时间点的多源数据, 发现顾客不文明行为通过员工的内在动机这一中介机制影响员工的服务绩效，而这一中介效应的强度受到员工的核心自我评价的影响。顾客不文明行为通过内在动机对服务绩效的间接负效应在核心自我评价高的员工中要弱于它在核心自我评价低的员工中。

KEYWORDS:

• Customer incivility
• intrinsic motivation
• core self-evaluations
• service performance

关键词:

• 顾客不文明行为
• 内在动机
• 核心自我评价
• 服务绩效

Acknowledgements

I thank Eugene Kim for his aid in data collection and in providing constructive comments and support during the development of this article. I benefited greatly from comments of the associated editor Levent Altinay and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. I also appreciate Tao Yang and Mahn Hee Yoon for their invaluable assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The shopping mall is consisted of a number of small stores that are no larger than 500 square feet. While the ownership of the mall owns many of these stores and directly hires service employees to sell products across the stores, it also rents out or sells some of the stores to individual owners. These store owners have separate product suppliers from the ownership of the mall and autonomously decide what they want to sell and how they conduct their business. Due to the small size of these stores, the individual store owners often do not hire service employees; instead, they themselves play the role of service employees. Since they are independent entities within the mall, corporate management of the mall does not collect performance data of these tenants/owners.

2 We replicated these findings without including the control variables in the analyses.