Coping with customer mistreatment: Joining job routinization and proactive personality

Abstract

Purpose

Drawing on the transaction theory of stress, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize customer mistreatment as a stressor and examine how job routinization and proactive personality help employees cope with the effects of customer mistreatment on emotional exhaustion and work engagement. The interaction of job routinization and proactive personality was also tested.

Design/methodology/approach

In total, 128 hundred nurses were recruited to participate in the current study, which was a daily survey for two consecutive weeks (10 working days).

Findings

The results revealed that job routinization and proactive personality attenuated the effects of customer mistreatment on emotional exhaustion and work engagement. The analyses also showed that, with more proactive personality and high job routinization, the effects of customer mistreatment were minimized.

Originality/value

Job routinization is a type of job resources that attenuates the negative influence of customer mistreatment. Proactive personality strengthens job routinization’s function, when proactive personality and job routinization are both high, the ill effect of customer mistreatment will be minimized.

Citation

Wu, H., Wang, X. and Chen, P. (2019), "Coping with customer mistreatment: Joining job routinization and proactive personality", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 34 No. 8, pp. 519-532. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-10-2018-0473