How emotional regulation and conscientiousness break the reciprocal circle between customer mistreatment and surface acting: an experience sampling study
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
ISSN: 0959-6119
Article publication date: 8 June 2022
Issue publication date: 21 October 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on the conservation of resource theory and emotional contagion perspective, this study aims to propose that customer mistreatment has an indirect effect on subsequent customer mistreatment by triggering high levels of surface acting. In other words, there is a vicious circle formed as a result of customer mistreatment and surface acting. This paper further argues that emotional regulation and conscientiousness are effective in breaking this vicious circle.
Design/methodology/approach
An experience sampling study was conducted on 97 frontline service employees in a hotel chain’s restaurants in China, with two daily surveys for ten consecutive days. Multilevel path analyses were used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The results indicate that employees experiencing customer mistreatment in the morning would adopt the surface acting strategy more frequently in the afternoon, which in turn induces more customer mistreatment in the afternoon. Further, this indirect effect can be mitigated by high (versus low) levels of emotional regulation and conscientiousness.
Originality/value
Recently, there has been growing recognition of the vital links between customer mistreatment and negative employee outcomes. However, these studies have failed to consider the carryover effect of customer mistreatment. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first pioneer study on whether and how customer mistreatment can affect subsequent instances of customer mistreatment, thereby offering a more comprehensive understanding of the consequences of customer mistreatment.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The first two authors have equally contributed to this paper. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers: 72001218 and 71832006) and JSPS KAKENHI (grant number JP20K13555).
Citation
Lan, J., Gong, Y., Liu, T., Wong, M.-N. and Yuan, B. (2022), "How emotional regulation and conscientiousness break the reciprocal circle between customer mistreatment and surface acting: an experience sampling study", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 34 No. 11, pp. 4007-4028. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-09-2021-1102
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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