THE INFLUENCE OF CUSTOMER INCIVILITY ON HOTEL FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES' RESPONSES AND SERVICE SABOTAGE: DOES CO-WORKER SUPPORT MATTER?

Abstract

Customer incivility poses a difficulty for service industries since employees' negative responses to such customers may threaten the organization's success. Service industries implement stringent display guidelines and keep an eye on how Frontline Employees' Responses (FLEs) engage with customers. This study aims to investigate the impact of customer incivility on FLEs' negative responses and service sabotage, and to evaluate the moderating effect of co-worker support. The data is collected from 386 Sharm El-Sheikh hotel employees. The PLS-SEM results revealed that customer incivility positively affects service sabotage, FLEs rumination, and retaliation intention. Similarly, the study findings proved that FLEs' rumination and retaliation intention positively affect service sabotage behavior. Accordingly, both FLEs' rumination and retaliation intention, based on the results, succeeded in mediating the linkage between customer incivility and service sabotage behavior. In addition, the current study strived to use co-worker support as a strategy to mitigate customer incivility consequences by investigating its influence as a moderator on the relationships of customer incivility towards both FLEs' rumination and retaliation intention, and the result demonstrated that co-worker support succeeded in mitigating the customer incivility negative impacts. The study's results broaden our understanding of the effect of customer incivility on two different types of employee responses (psychological and behavioral). The practical contributions recommend the need to train FLEs to give them sufficient experience and skills to deal with customer incivility behaviors, and mutual support behaviors must be developed among workers.

Keywords

• customer incivility
• employees' responses
• co-worker support
• service sabotage
• hotel frontline employees