How does dysfunctional customer behavior affect employee turnover
Journal of Service Theory and Practice
ISSN: 2055-6225
Article publication date: 17 September 2019
Issue publication date: 20 September 2019
Abstract
Purpose
Dysfunctional customer behavior is believed to engender employee stress and, in turn, fuel employee turnover. However, little research has examined the moderating role of individual-level and contextual-level resource variables. The purpose of this paper is to fill these gaps by examining employee embeddedness and individualism–collectivism as putative moderators of the hypothesized mediation chain.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a field study involving 264 service employees working in two hotels operated by the same international hotel chain, one in South Korea (n=138) and the other in the UK (n=126).
Findings
Results show that employee embeddedness weakens the impact of dysfunctional customer behavior on employee turnover via employee stress. In addition, findings suggest that collectivists (individualists) are more (less) likely to be receptive to embeddedness cues.
Originality/value
This is the first known study to show that employee embeddedness can mitigate the impact of dysfunctional customer behavior on turnover via employee stress. This moderated-mediation model is further moderated by employees’ cultural value orientation (individualism–collectivism). Prior literature is not explicit on these complex models.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A5A8019512).
Citation
Gong, T. and Wang, C.-Y. (2019), "How does dysfunctional customer behavior affect employee turnover", Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 329-352. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSTP-04-2018-0081
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited