Journal Screenshot

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

Open Access Journal

ISSN: 2222-6990

The Effect of Customer Incivility on Frontline Employee Using EVLN Model: Mediated by Negative Emotion and Moderated by Job Meaningfulness

Roshayati Abdul Hamid, Gaiyathri A/P Subramaniam

http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARBSS/v13-i1/16191

Open access

The service industry is a unique sector of frequent interactions between customers and employees, particularly with frontline employees play a crucial role in determining service quality and customers’ satisfaction. However, experiencing customer incivility is a reality for many frontline employees. Past research has established that dealing with customer incivility is extremely stressful and can lead them to engage in destructive behavior. Those behavior is likely to cause various forms of negative employee well-being and decreased organizational performance. The purpose of this study is to delve deeper into the experience of customer incivility from the perspective of frontline employees and their respond to destructive behavior using the EVLN (exit, voice, loyalty and neglect) model. Furthermore, this study also examines what mitigates and exacerbates the negative influence of customer incivility by measuring the mediating effect of negative emotion and moderating effects of job meaningfulness. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between customer incivility and destructive behavior, and to examine the role of job meaningfulness as a moderator and negative emotion as a mediator. Data was analyzed using the PLS-SEM. The results showed that customer incivility influenced employee’s destructive behavior through their negative emotion. On the other hand, job meaningfulness mitigates the employee’s destructive behavior. The findings from this study can drive organizations to motivate their employees and provide a flexible job structure to encourage the employees to have a feeling of meaningfulness towards their job.

Al-Hawari, M. A., Bani-Melhem, S., & Quratulain, S. (2020). Effectively with abusive supervision and customer incivility? Testing the effect of employee resilience. Journal of Business and Psychology, 35(2), 223-240.
Alhujailli, A., & Karwowski, W. (2018). Emotional and stress responses to cyberbullying. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 33-43). Springer, Cham.
Alt, D., & Itzkovich, Y. (2015). Assessing the connection between students' justice experience and perceptions of faculty incivility in higher education. Journal of Academic Ethics, 13, 121–134
Anderson, J. C., & Gerbing, D. W. (1984). The effect of sampling error on convergence, improper solutions, and goodness-of-fit indices for maximum likelihood confirmatory factor analysis. Psychametrika, 49, 155-173.
Andersson, L. M., & Pearson, C. M. (1999). Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 452-471.
Azeem, M. U., De Clercq, D., & Haq, I. U. (2021). Suffering doubly: How victims of coworker incivility risk poor performance ratings by responding with organizational deviance unless they leverage ingratiation skills. The Journal of Social Psychology, 161(1), 86-102.
Bailey, C., Lips?Wiersma, M., Madden, A., Yeoman, R., Thompson, M., & Chalofsky, N. (2019). The five paradoxes of meaningful work: Introduction to the special issue ‘meaningful work: Prospects for the 21st century’. Journal of Management Studies, 56(3), 481-499.
Balaji, M. S., Jiang, Y., Singh, G., & Jha, S. (2020). Letting go or getting back: How organization culture shapes frontline employee response to customer incivility. Journal of Business Research, 111, 1-11.
Bani-Melhem, S.(2020). What mitigate and exacerbate the influences of customer incivility on frontline employee extra-role behaviour?. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 44, 38-49
Baranik, L. E., Wang, M., Gong, Y., & Shi, J. (2017). Customer mistreatment, employee health, and job performance: Cognitive rumination and social sharing as mediating mechanisms. Journal of Management, 43(4), 1261-1282.
Basch, J., & Fisher, C. D. (1998). Affective events-emotions matrix: A classification of work events and associated emotions (pp. 1-20). Bond University.
Brotheridge, C. M., & Lee, R. T. (2010). Restless and confused: Emotional responses to workplace bullying in men and women. Career Development International, 15(7), 687-707.
Buckley, P., & Majumdar, R. (2018). The services powerhouse: Increasingly vital to world economic growth. Deloitte Insights.
https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/economy/issues-by-the-numbers/trade-in-services-economy growth.html
Bunk, J. A., & Magley, V. J. (2013). The role of appraisals and emotions in understanding experiences of workplace incivility. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18(1), 87.
Caillier, J. G. (2021). The impact of workplace aggression on employee satisfaction with job stress, meaningfulness of work, and turnover intentions. Public Personnel Management, 50(2), 159-182.
Carver, C. S. (2006). Approach, avoidance, and the self-regulation of affect and action. Motivation and Emotion, 30(2), 105-110.
Chin, W. W., Marcolin, B. L., & Newsted, P. R. (2003). A partial least squares latent variable modeling approach for measuring interaction effects: Results from a Monte Carlo simulation study and an electronic-mail emotion/adoption study. Information Systems Research, 14(2), 189-217.
Cho, M., Bonn, M. A., Han, S. J., & Lee, K. H. (2016). Workplace incivility and its effect upon restaurant frontline service employee emotions and service performance. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 28(12), 2888-2912.
Clark, C. M. (2008). Student voices on faculty incivility in nursing education: A conceptual model. Nursing Education Perspectives, 29(5), 284–289.
Cortina, L. M., Magley, V. J., Williams, J. H., & Langhout, R. D. (2001). Incivility in the workplace: Incidence and impact. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 6(1), 64.
Crosno, J. L., Rinaldo, S. B., Black, H. G., & Kelley, S. W. (2009). Half full or half empty: The role of optimism in boundary-spanning positions. Journal of Service Research, 11(3), 295-309.
Daniels, S. R., Holmvall, C. M., Sobhani, S., Sumpter, D. M., & Thornton, L. (2019). Selective Incivility: Undermining Ambitions of Inclusion in Organizations. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2019, No. 1, p. 12482). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Demirtas, O., Hannah, S. T., Gok, K., Arslan, A., & Capar, N. (2017). The moderated influence of ethical leadership, via meaningful work, on followers’ engagement, organizational identification, and envy. Journal of Business Ethics, 145(1), 183-199.
DOSM-Department of Statistics Malaysia Official Portal. (2020). The Source of Malaysia’s Official Statistic. https://www.dosm.gov.my/v1/index.php?r=home/community
Dolev, N., Itzkovich, Y., & Fisher-Shalem, O. (2021). A call for transformation: Exit, Voice, Loyalty and Neglect (EVLN) in response to workplace incivility. Work, (Preprint), 1-12.
Farrell, D. (1983). Exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect as responses to job dissatisfaction: A multidimensional scaling study. Academy of Management Journal, 26(4), 596–607.
Farrell, D., & Rusbult, C. E. (1992). Exploring the exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect typology: The influence of job satisfaction, quality of alternatives, and investment size. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 5(3), 201–218.
Frieder, R. E., G. Wang, and I. S. Oh. (2018). Linking Job-Relevant Personality Traits, Transformational Leadership, and Job Performance via Perceived Meaningfulness at Work: A Moderated Mediation Model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103 (3), 324–333.
Goldberg, L. S., & Grandey, A. A. (2007). Display rules versus display autonomy: Emotion regulation, emotional exhaustion, and task performance in a call center simulation. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 301–318.
Grandey, A. A., Dickter, D. N., & Sin, H. P. (2004). The customer is not always right: Customer aggression and emotion regulation of service employees. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 25(3), 397-418.
Gross, J. J., Sheppes, G., & Urry, H. L. (2011). Emotion generation and emotion regulation: A distinction we should make (carefully). Cognition and Emotion, 25, 765–781.
Guevara, K., & Ord, J. (1996). The search for meaning in a changing work context. Futures, 28(8), 709–722.
Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1975). Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60, 159–170
Hagedoorn, M., van Yperen, N. W., van de Vliert, E., & Buunk, B. P. (1999). Employees’ reactions to problematic events: A circumplex structure of five categories of responses, and the role of job satisfaction. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 20(3), 309–321.
Hair, J. F., Sarstedt, M., Hopkins, L., & Kuppelwieser, V. G. (2014). Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) An Emerging Tool in Business Research. Eurasian Business Review 26(2): 106–121.
Hair, J.F., Sarstedt, M., Ringle, C.M., & Gudergan, S.P. (2017). Advanced issues in partial least squares structural equation modeling. 2nd Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage publications.
Han, S. J., Bonn, M. A., & Cho, M. (2016). The relationship between customer incivility, restaurant frontline service employee burnout and turnover intention. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 52, 97-106.
Han, S. H., Sung, M., & Suh, B. (2021). Linking meaningfulness to work outcomes through job characteristics and work engagement. Human Resource Development International, 24(1), 3-22.
Harris, L. C., & Reynolds, K. L. (2003). The consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior. Journal of Service Research, 6(2), 144-161.
Henkel, A. P., Boegershausen, J., Rafaeli, A., & Lemmink, J. (2017). The social dimension of service interactions: observer reactions to customer incivility. Journal of Service Research, 20(2), 120-134.
Henseler, J., Ringle, C. M., & Sarstedt, M. (2015). A new criterion for assessing discriminant validity in variance-based structural equation modeling. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 43(1): 115-135.
Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of Resources a New Attempt at Conceptualizing Stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513.
Jawahar, I. M., & Schreurs, B. (2018). Supervisor incivility and how it affects subordinates’ performance: a matter of trust. Personnel Review, 47(3), 709-726.
Jung, H. S., Park, Y. M., & Yoon, H. H. (2017). Spillover Effects in Customer Incivility: Impacts on Frontline Employees' Negative Behaviors. Culinary Science and Hospitality Research, 23(6), 110-117.
Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work. Academy of Management Journal, 33 (4), 692–724.
Kern, J. H., & Grandey, A. A. (2009). Customer incivility as a social stressor: the role of race and racial identity for service employees. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 14(1), 46.
Kim, Y. S., & Baker, M. A. (2019). Observer reactions to other customer incivility: Emotional labor, gratitude, loyalty to employee and tipping intention. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 31(3), 1292-1308.
Kim, H., & Qu, H. (2019). The effects of experienced customer incivility on employees’ behavior toward customers and coworkers. Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, 43(1), 58-77.
Koopmann, J., Wang, M., Liu, Y., & Song, Y. (2015). Customer mistreatment: A review of conceptualizations and a multilevel theoretical model. Mistreatment in Organizations (Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being) 13, 33-79.
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer publishing company.
Lee, K. J., & Kim, S. G. (2021). Structural review of customer incivility and social competences of frontline employees for prevention and mitigation. Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism, 1-21.
Liljegren, M., Nordlund, A., & Ekberg, K. (2008). Psychometric evaluation and further validation of the Hagedoorn et al. modified EVLN measure: Personality and social sciences. Scandinavian. Journal of Psychology, 49(2), 169–177.
Li, H., Jin, H., & Chen, T. (2020). Linking proactive personality to creative performance: The role of job crafting and high?involvement work systems. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 54(1), 196-210.
Liu, C. E., Chen, Y., He, W., & Huang, J. (2019). Supervisor incivility and millennial employee creativity: A moderated mediation model. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 47(9), 1-11.
Naeem, M., Weng, Q. D., Ali, A., & Hameed, Z. (2019). An eye for an eye: does subordinates’ negative workplace gossip lead to supervisor abuse? Personnel Review, 49(1), 284-302.
Phillips, T., & Smith, P. (2004). Emotional and behavioural responses to everyday incivility: Challenging the fear/avoidance paradigm. Journal of Sociology, 40(4), 378-399.
Porath, C. L., & Pearson, C. M. (2012). Emotional and behavioral responses to workplace incivility and the impact of hierarchical status. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42, E326-E357.
Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The price of incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1-2), 114-121.
Qi, L., Wei, X., Li, Y., Liu, B., & Xu, Z. (2020). The influence of mistreatment by patients on job satisfaction and turnover intention among Chinese nurses: a three-wave survey. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(4), 1256.
Rafaeli, A., Erez, A., Ravid, S., Derfler-Rozin, R., Treister, D. E., & Scheyer, R. (2012). When customers exhibit verbal aggression, employees pay cognitive costs. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(5), 931–950.
Reio Jr, T. G. (2011). Supervisor and coworker incivility: Testing the work frustration- aggression model. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 13(1), 54-68.
Ringle, C. M., Wende, S., & Becker, J. M. (2015). SmartPLS 3. Boenningstedt: SmartPLS GmbH, http://www.smartpls.com.
Rosner, L., Winter, S., & Kramer, N. C. (2016). Dangerous minds? Effects of uncivil online comments on aggressive cognitions, emotions, and behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 58, 461-470.
Roter, A. B. (2018). The dark side of the workplace: Managing incivility. Routledge.
Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Rupp, D. E., & Spencer, S. (2006). When customers lash out: The effects of customer interactional injustice on emotional labor and the mediating role of discrete emotions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(4), 971–978.
Rusbult, C. E., Farrell, D., Rogers, G., & Mainous, A. G. (1988). Impact of exchange variables on exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect: An integrative model of responses to declining job satisfaction. Academy of Management Journal, 31(3), 599–628.
Sarstedt, M., Hair J. F., Cheah, J. H., Becker, J. M., & Ringle, C. M. (2019). How to specify, estimate, and validate higher-order constructs in PLS-SEM. Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ), 27(3), 197-211.
Sguera, F., Bagozzi, R. P., Huy, Q. N., Boss, R. W., & Boss, D. S. (2016). Curtailing the harmful effects of workplace incivility: The role of structural demands and organization-provided resources. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 95, 115-127.
Si, S., & Li, Y. (2012). Human resource management practices on exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect: Organizational commitment as a mediator. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 23(8), 1705–1716.
Siagian, V. (2020). Customer Expectation and Customer Satisfaction: Reviewing Service Quality of UBER. JKBM (Jurnal Konsep Bisnis dan Manajemen), 6(2), 209-217.
Sliter, M., & Jones, M. (2016). A qualitative and quantitative examination of the antecedents of customer incivility. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 21(2), 208.
Sliter, M., Jex, S., Wolford, K., & McInnerney, J. (2010). How rude! Emotional labor as a mediator between customer incivility and employee outcomes. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 15(4), 468.
Sliter, M., Sliter, K., & Jex, S. (2012). The employee as a punching bag: The effect of multiple sources of incivility on employee withdrawal behavior and sales performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 33(1), 121-139.
Smith, P., Phillips, T. L., & King, R. D. (2010). Incivility: The rude stranger in everyday life. Cambridge University Press.
Sommovigo, V., Setti, I., Argentero, P., & O’Shea, D. (2019). The impact of customer incivility and verbal aggression on service providers: A systematic review. Work, 62(1), 59-86.
Sommovigo, V., Setti, I., O’ Shea, D., & Argentero, P. (2020). Investigating employees’ emotional and cognitive reactions to customer mistreatment: an experimental study. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 29(5), 707-727.
Spector, P. E., & Fox, S. (2005). The Stressor-Emotion Model of Counterproductive Work Behavior. In S. Fox & P. E. Spector (Eds.), Counterproductive work behavior: Investigations of actors and targets (pp. 151–174).
Steger, M. F., Dik, B. J., & Duffy, R. D. (2012). Measuring meaningful work: The Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI). Journal of Career Assessment, 20, 322–337.
Szczygiel, D. D., & Mikolajczak, M. (2018). Emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative emotions on job burnout in nursing. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2649.
Szczygie?, D., Buczny, J., & Bazi?ska, R. (2012). Emotion regulation and emotional information processing: The moderating effect of emotional awareness. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(3), 433-437.
Tenenhaus, M., Vinzi, V. E., Chatelin, Y. M., & Lauro, C. (2005). PLS path modeling. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 48(1), 159-205.
Vagharseyyedin, S. A. (2015). Workplace incivility: A concept analysis. Contemporary Nurse, 50(1), 115-125.
Van Jaarsveld, D. D., Walker, D. D., & Skarlicki, D. P. (2010). The role of job demands and emotional exhaustion in the relationship between customer and employee incivility. Journal of Management, 36(6), 1486-1504.
Viotti, S., Converso, D., Hamblin, L. E., Guidetti, G., & Arnetz, J. E. (2018). Organisational efficiency and co-worker incivility: A cross-national study of nurses in the USA and Italy. Journal of Nursing Management, 26(5), 597-604.
Voorhees, C. M., Fombelle, P. W., & Bone, S. A. (2020). Don’t forget about the frontline employee during the COVID-19 pandemic: Preliminary insights and a research agenda on market shocks. Journal of Service Research, 23(4), 396-400.
Walker, D. D., van Jaarsveld, D. D., & Skarlicki, D. P. (2017). Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can also hurt me: The relationship between customer verbal aggression and employee incivility. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(2), 163–179.
Wang, M., Liao, H., Zhan, Y., & Shi, J. (2011). Daily customer mistreatment and employee sabotage against customers: Examining emotion and resource perspectives. Academy of Management Journal, 54(2), 312–334.
Wang, M., Liu, S., Liao, H., Gong, Y., Kammeyer-Mueller, J., & Shi, J. (2013). Can’t get it out of my mind: Employee rumination after customer mistreatment and negative mood in the next morning. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(6), 989–1004.
Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1984). Negative Affectivity: the disposition to experience eversive emotional states. Psychological Bulletin, 96(3), 465.
Weiss, H. M., & Cropanzano, R. (1996). Affective events theory. Research in Organizational Behavior, 18(1), 1-74.
Wilson, N. L., & Holmvall, C. M. (2013). The development and validation of the Incivility from Customers Scale. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18(3), 310.
Yang, H. C., & Kim, Y. E. (2018). The effects of corporate social responsibility on job performance: Moderating effects of authentic leadership and meaningfulness of work. The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business, 5(3), 121-132.
Yang, F. X., & Lau, V. M. C. (2019). Evil customers, an angel boss and coopetitive coworkers: Burnout of frontline employees. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 83, 1-10.
Yeh, C. W. (2015). Linking customer verbal aggression and service sabotage. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 25(6), 877–896.
Yoo, J., & Arnold T. J. (2016). Frontline Employee Customer-Oriented Attitude in the Presence of Job Demands and Resources: The Influence upon Deep and Surface Acting. Journal of Service Research, 19 (1), 102-117.
Zhao, H., Wayne, S. J., Glibkowski, B. C., & Bravo, J. (2007). The impact of psychological contract breach on work-related outcomes: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 60(3), 647–680.

In-Text Citation: (Hamid & Subramaniam, 2023)
To Cite this Article: Hamid, R. A., & Subramaniam, G. A. (2023). The Effect of Customer Incivility on Frontline Employee Using EVLN Model: Mediated by Negative Emotion and Moderated by Job Meaningfulness. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 13(1), 1425 – 1443.