Predicting service employee incivility toward customers : the roles of employee boredom, emotional exhaustion, and organizational identification

• Main Author: Walker, David Douglas
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/17472

Workplace incivility, defined as low-intensity deviant and aggressive behaviors that violate workplace norms for mutual respect (Andersson & Pearson, 1999) is a pervasive problem in organizations. To date, workplace incivility research has tended to focus on incivility within organizations, such as between co-workers, rather than incivility that crosses organizational boundaries. This dissertation extends the research by examining employee incivility by service employees with potential to harm customers. Examples of employee incivility include employees disrespecting and not listening to customers. The primary goal of this research is to explore why service employees can be uncivil toward customers, labeled employee incivility. Specifically, I focused on customers mistreating employees as a determinant of employee incivility such as asking aggressive questions and ignoring instructions. In addition, I examined five theoretically derived explanations for the relationship between customer incivility and employee incivility: employee negative affect, job boredom, organizational identification, organizational disidentification and emotional exhaustion. A secondary goal of this research was to investigate the relationship between uncivil employee behavior and service employee performance. In addition, this research examined uncivil events, rather than overall employee evaluations of incivility at work. Uncivil events, or specific occurrences of incivility by customers were argued to predict instances of uncivil behavior by employees towards customers. This dissertation is one of the first studies to examine workplace incivility at this level of analysis. Using a field study of contact center service employees and a recorded sample of their interactions with customers (N = 68 for employees, N = 641 for interactions) this study found that employee incivility was positively related to customer incivility in both interactions and across employees. Service employees who experience higher (vs. lower) levels of incivility from customers directed more uncivil behaviors toward customers. In addition, both employee job boredom and emotional exhaustion were positively related to uncivil employee behaviors towards customers. The proposed explanations (mediators) for the relationship between customer incivility and employee incivility were not supported. Finally, employee incivility was negatively related to service employee performance.