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This study aims to examine customer misbehaviour in the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study draws on a cross-sectional survey of employees in the Scottish hospitality sector highlighting customer misbehaviour as a key concern during the pandemic. Prevalent types of abuse and harassment experienced are outlined along with employee and management responses to incidents of misbehaviour.

Verbal abuse and sexual harassment from customers are the most prevalent types of misbehaviour either experienced or witnessed by respondents. Customer misbehaviour is commonly thought of as “part of the job” and therefore “not a big deal”. Managers, largely, expect workers to tolerate abusive behaviours from customers and do not take reports of incidents seriously.

Transformational managers need to foster workplace well-being with a focus on physical and psychological safety. Recognition of the issue and greater support for victims are furthermore required at an industry level and on the policy front.

The research points to an uncomfortable reality in the service economy that needs to be confronted by society. It has, therefore, important implications for key stakeholders in ensuring fair, dignified and safe hospitality workplaces.

Customer misbehaviour is reportedly worsening in times of COVID-19 as demonstrated by this study. Despite rhetoric that abuse and harassment are not tolerated, dismissive attitudes from managers – who expect workers to tolerate abusive behaviour – and employee silence about incidents lead the authors to argue that the failure to acknowledge and address this issue constitutes a form of “social washing” in hospitality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined effects of customer aggression, job stress, and emotional intelligence (EI) on job satisfaction and organizational turnover among managers from a developing country, i.e. Pakistan.

Data are collected from 230 respondents working as bank managers in Pakistan by means of a cross-sectional survey. The collected data are analyzed by employing a structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

The employees perceive that job stress positively influences emotional exhaustion among employees. Furthermore, EI negatively influences job exhaustion to minimize the potential to lead it through to organizational turnover.

The combined effects of customer- and organization-related elements have been scarcely investigated – the heart and soul of contribution regarding this research. The moderation of EI to lessen the emotional exhaustion is a significant contribution to this study. Finally, the context of Pakistan’s banking sector is also unique to this study.

This paper aims to model staff reactions to a hotel based on the way they perceive hotel’s treatment of customers. It suggests that employees are not motivated to help abused customers in the form of customer-oriented behaviors (COBs) until employees also feel that they are victims of abuse by the hotel. Hence, effects of staff’s unfavorable justice perceptions for customers on employee COBs are expected to be negative until staff’s unfavorable justice perceptions for themselves, interacting in this relationship, turn it positive.

Drawing on social exchange and compassion theories, the argument is made that staff members who are also victims of abuse by the hotel can empathize more with guests, turning quid pro quo responses to abuse of customers into compassionate responses.

Regression results from a field study of 280 employees at ten hotels in the Canary Islands provide general support for our hypotheses.

By understanding when and why (un)fair treatment of guests and staff has consequences for the hotel in the form of COBs, hotel managers can favor a better staff response to hotels’ careful stewardship of the service encounter in terms of COBs. The reversal of the direction in the relationship suggests the unfolding of compassion within a justice framework, which challenges the long-lived perceived incompatibility between compassion and justice in the organizational literature.

The present study is the first one to study COBs stemming either from staff responses to hotels’ abuse of customers or COBs resulting from the interaction between perceived justice for customers and justice perceptions for themselves.

Christopher Lovelock originated the term “jaycustomer” behavior to refer to customers who deliberately act in a thoughtless or abusive manner, causing problems for the firm, employees, or other customers. An overview of existing literature reveals the focal concentration of empirical research regarding the listing or categorization of jaycustomer behaviors has been on individual forms. While the need for a development of a typology of general or all‐embracing jaycustomer behaviors has been recognized, and forwarded by a small number of researchers, such efforts have been anecdotal or conceptual in nature, or have emerged as part of wider research. The aim of this study is to advance understanding of the different forms of jaycustomer behaviors through providing empirical insights that explore and describe the activities and motivations of such “deviant” or “dysfunctional” customer behaviors through garnering empirical insights from both customer‐contact employees and customers themselves. After a review of existing literatures and a discussion of the research design and approach adopted, the findings from over 100 in‐depth interviews, utilizing critical incident technique, are presented and the implications of the study discussed.

Supplementary fees such as restocking fees, nonrefundable shipping and handling fees, and cancellation fees have become prevalent in the USA, and customers as well as the popular media have raised serious concerns about them. This paper aims to test whether such fees could benefit consumers because they lead to lower prices.

Transaction data that include prices and fees were collected from different service providers, including hotels, airlines, online retailers, and restaurants. The data were collected from different countries at different points in time. Cross‐sectional and panel data sets were used to test the relationship between fees and prices.

The empirical results indicate that on average higher fees lead to lower prices for the majority of customers who do not abuse customer‐friendly service policies. These findings are valid for different service industries in different countries even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity using panel econometric models.

The results are consistent with the hypothesis that special fees are used to limit the abuse of customer‐friendly service policies, thus helping service providers to offer lower prices to the majority of customers who do not abuse these policies.

This study aims to identify and elucidate on the different forms and antecedents of customer misbehaviour in the service industry of the emerging country particularly India.

This study adopts a bibliometric analysis approach using bibliophagy software and thematic analysis to reveal four themes: “forms of customer misbehaviour”; “antecedents of such misbehaviour”; “changes in the personal and work behaviour of employees and management”; and “measures to reduce customer misbehaviour”. These are combined and interrelated to extant theories and empirical data to ultimately produce a comprehensive model on the subject.

This study finds the antecedents and analyses different forms of customer misbehaviour from Asian customer perspectives. A thematic output is provided which policymakers and other researchers can use to develop various policies and which other related research could use as inputs in the area or consumer behaviour and emerging countries.

This study contributes to the field of behavioural studies, especially in the Asian context. Policymakers and future researchers can use these findings to understand different customer-related issues from Asian customer perspective. However, the focus on the Indian consumer market as an emerging country in Asia limits the applicability and generalizability of the study for all emerging countries.

The originality and value of this study is related to its pioneering use of bibliometric and thematic analysis from the Asian service context. The value of such research work is associated with both scholarly and executive implications. Regarding the latter, this study examines the myopic nature of uncivil behaviour and helps service firms to understand and manage its different forms, conclusively also providing practicable executive directions on the problem.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the direct and moderating effect of negative affectivity (NA) (Study 1) and self‐efficacy (Study 2) on the relationship between customer verbal aggression and three forms of emotion‐focused coping strategies: behavioral disengagement, seeking emotional support, and venting negative emotions.

Two samples of service workers were recruited from northern Israel in 2007‐2008 (n=178 and n=516), and data were collected using self‐reported questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analyses.

The results show that under high levels of exposure to customer aggression, employees with high NA were more likely to use behavioral disengagement than low‐NA individuals, employees with low NA were less likely to vent negative emotions than high‐NA individuals, and employees with high self‐efficacy were less likely to use venting and emotional support than employees with low self‐efficacy. In addition, self‐efficacy was found to reduce the negative impact of customer aggression on emotional exhaustion.

Through appropriate training programs, service organizations can foster their employees' sense of trust in their own ability to cope with customer misbehavior and consequently reduce reliance on dysfunctional coping strategies.

While it has been established that verbal abuse from customers constitutes a common experience for many service workers, little is known about the manner in which workers cope with this particular job stressor and even less about the individual differences that may explain coping behaviors in this context. The present paper begins to bridge this gap and contributes to existing literature by showing that in addition to being predictors of dysfunctional coping strategies, both NA and self‐efficacy may play a moderating role in the relationship between customer aggression and coping behaviors.

The study aimed to investigate the impact of customer misbehaviors on airline in-flight customer contact personnel. A theoretical framework was proposed to test the meditating role of role stress and emotional labor in the relationship between consumer misbehaviors and emotional exhaustion.

In all, 336 cabin crew members employed by international airline companies participated in the study. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling with AMOS 20.0.

The results provide evidence that customer misbehaviors relate positively to employee role stress, emotional labor and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, role stress and emotional labor play important roles in enhancing the impacts of customer misbehaviors and thereby influence employee emotional exhaustion.

The findings potentially impact on employers both within and beyond the airline industry by demonstrating how frontline employees can be provided with support to reduce stress or exhaustion, leading ultimately to increased satisfaction.

This study has provided deeper theoretical insights into customer misbehaviors and their effects on employee role stress, emotional labor and emotional exhaustion.

The article challenges the narrow view in scholarship which presents disengagement as passive and simply the absence of condition of engagement and explores how food retail employees articulate their disengagement within the intensified customer-centric service work. The article adopts the term “active disengagement”, as presented by Ackroyd and Thompson (2016) and empirically examines this as a form of oppositional voice towards managerial norms and behavioural expectations.

The article draws on qualitative data from two case study organisations in the Cypriot food retail sector. Forty-six interviews took place with participants across different departments, including front-line employees and front-line and senior managers, to better understand the research problem through different perspectives.

The data show that disengagement is an integral part of organisational life and it is expressed in an individual and less-risky way. The data also reveal a variation in disengagement actions across departments, depending on employees' mobility on the shop floor and the intensity of interaction with the customers and the line manager. Shop floor employees enjoyed a wider “space of disengagement”, in comparison to those working on the front-end/checkouts. Nevertheless, checkout employees have developed sophisticated actions to express disengagement.

This research provides a refined understanding of active disengagement in organisations. It empirically contributes to the existence of a spectrum of engagement and expands Ackroyd and Thompson's (2016) “active disengagement” framework, discussing it as a form of oppositional voice towards corporate values and the customer-centric work intensification.

The research provides empirical evidence that employee disengagement is not merely the absence of engagement, as HRM scholars and practitioners have argued, but entails further social meanings. This article will be useful for practitioners to rethink, revisit and revise employee engagement programmes in organisations, as well as to re-write corporate values, mission and vision, to also consider employees' experiences within the workplace. This will allow the provision of social support by management to address active disengagement in service organisations.

The study provides an important insight in employees' individual actions to express disengagement towards corporate values and managerial expectations related to customer service. It highlights the variation of dynamics across the food retail shop floor, which has been treated as a contextual periphery within the disengagement debate. Applying a broader lens on retail work heterogeneity, it provides further understanding of the diversity of how frontline service workers express disengagement within the triadic employment relationship. This study offers ground for future research to examine active disengagement in various contexts for better conceptual and practical understanding of this behaviour in organisations.

This paper aims to examine the phenomenon of disruptive service behavior: an act by a customer that negatively affects the service experience of other customers and to identify typology of disruptive behaviors of customers that can negatively alter the service experiences of by-standing customers.

Anecdotes of customers’ service experiences that were negatively affected by the behavior of other customers were gathered from several customer review and discussion websites using a netnographic study approach. Data were analyzed using a qualitative data analysis approach with an iterative and inductive methodologies.

The analysis produced a typology featuring seven categories of disruptive behaviors of customers: “Inattentive Parents with Naughty Kids”, “Oral Abusers”, “Outlandish Requesters”, “Hysterical shouters”, “Poor Hygiene Manners”, “Service Rule Breakers” and “Ignorant Customers”.

Using the typology developed in this study, managers and operators of hospitality businesses can identify specific customer service behaviors and develop strategies and actions to minimize the impact of those behaviors on the service experience of other customers.

Even though a great deal of attention has been given to how employees can damage customers’ service experiences, much less work has been conducted on disruptive behaviors of customers as an influential factor of service quality and satisfaction. This study aims to address this gap in the literature by developing a typology of disruptive customer behaviors.