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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.

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.

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.

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.

Despite recognition of the importance of emotions and emotion regulation in service encounters, emotion regulation has been generally studied from an employee perspective. This study investigated customer emotion regulation behaviours (CEREBs) in face-to-face service encounters; arguing for a more nuanced approach through an emotion regulation matrix representing the playing up and downplaying of positive or negative emotions. Motivational factors and service-related situational conditions that influence the likelihood of emotion regulation were also examined.

Four focus groups and the critical incident technique method were used to obtain data from people who had interacted with service employees within the previous six months.

There was support for emotion regulation in the four facets of the emotion regulation matrix. Five CEREB dimensions, including verbal behaviours and facial expressions, were evident. Motivational factors and situational conditions that impacted on customer emotion regulation in service encounters were also identified.

The findings were based on two qualitative methods. A quantitative approach should be used to further validate the suggested framework.

Most research on emotion regulation has focused on employees. We examined the phenomenon from a customer viewpoint and in a service encounter context. As customers are not bound by employment rules and conventions, a wider range of emotion regulation behaviours were found. The study used the four-faceted emotion regulation matrix to investigate this, developing a conceptual framework that provides a foundation for future research.

Drawing upon affective events theory, the authors propose that the subordinates’ negative gossip acts as a targeting affective event which leads to supervisor negative emotions. In turn, such negative emotions provoke supervisors to exhibit abusive behavior toward their subordinates. Additionally, the authors propose that an affective dispositional factor, namely, supervisor emotional regulation, moderates the hypothesized relationships. Using multisource data and a moderated-mediation model, the authors find that the supervisor’s perception of the subordinates’ negative workplace gossip is associated with abusive supervision through the supervisor’s negative emotions. Moreover, the supervisor’s emotional regulation mitigates the relationship between such negative gossip and the supervisor’s negative emotions. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Data were collected from employees (e.g. subordinates) and their immediate supervisors in organizations representing a variety of industries (e.g. finance, health care, information technology, public safety and human services) located in three cities in China. Respondents were recruited from different professional online forums with the offer of free movie tickets in return for participation.

Using multisource data and a moderated-mediation model, the authors find that the supervisor’s perception of the subordinates’ negative workplace gossip is associated with abusive supervision through the supervisor’s negative emotions. Moreover, the supervisor’s emotional regulation mitigates the relationship between such negative gossip and the supervisor’s negative emotions, but not the relationship between the supervisor’s negative emotions and abusive supervision.

Like all studies, the current one is not without limitations. First, the data were collected using a cross-sectional research design, which limits the interference of causality among the hypothesized relationships in the model. Future research work should apply alternative research designs such as a daily diary or longitudinal data collection (Shadish et al., 2002), in order to support the validity of the study.

In practical terms, abusive supervision is recognized as a destructive workplace behavior that is costly to organizations (Mackey et al., 2017; Martinko et al., 2013). Thus, it is important for organizational management and practitioners to understand the reasons why supervisors exhibit abusive behavior toward subordinates.

Through this study, higher management must understand harmful effects of subordinates’ workplace negative gossip, it must be recognized as other types of workplace mistreatment (rudeness and incivility), establishment and enforcement of the code of conduct can prevent negative workplace gossip prevalence in the workplace.

This study has contributed to the organizational behavior literature in several aspects. First, most studies have examined the consequences of abusive supervisor through subordinates victimization, current study contributes in the ongoing stream of research by examining antecedents of abusive supervision through subordinates’ social victimization (e.g. negative workplace gossip) of supervisors.

This paper aims to explore service encounters from a social behavior perspective. By proposing that employees’ emotional labor strategies are influenced by customer displays of emotion, this paper answers calls to investigate the reciprocal nature of service interactions and the importance of taking both customers and service providers into account when delivering high-quality service is the goal.

The sample consisted of 121 dyads of customers and service employees from hairstyling salons. Data were collected from observations of the customers’ emotional displays, self-report surveys administered to the service employees measuring strategies of emotional labor and self-report surveys administered to the customers to assess their rapport with the service providers and their loyalty intentions.

Length of acquaintance was positively related to customers’ positive display, which mediated the relationship between length of acquaintance and employee-customer rapport. Customers’ positive display was negatively related to employees’ deep acting (i.e. modifying inner feelings) but not to surface acting (i.e. modifying superficial expressions). Customers’ positive display and employees’ surface acting were related to loyalty intentions through the mediation of rapport.

This study provides a better understanding of the customer’s role as the target, and a possible cause of emotional regulation among service employees. It underscores the role of service relationships in customers’ emotional behavior and customer-related outcomes.

This study aims to extend emotional labor theories to the customer outcomes by examining a theoretical model of how emotional labor performed by the service worker affects customer satisfaction in a mediated way.

Structural equation modeling analyses partially support for our hypotheses from 282 dyadic survey data [i.e. service interactions customers (seniors) and service employees (caregivers)] from a home caregiver firm in South Korea.

The results of our study found that employee’s emotional regulation strategies of deep acting and surface acting differentially affect customer satisfaction, and that employee’s job satisfaction mediates the relationship between employee’s emotional regulation strategies and customer satisfaction. More specifically, the relationship between surface acting and customer satisfaction is fully mediated by employee’s job satisfaction, whereas the relationship between deep acting and customer satisfaction is partially mediated by employee’s job satisfaction.

Our study is the first to provide an empirical test of how employee job satisfaction mediates the relationship between employee emotional labor and customer satisfaction in service interactions. This research sheds light on the crucial role of employee job satisfaction that can be an important consideration to boost service quality and customer satisfaction by facilitating employee emotional labor.

This study aims to explore the concept of frontline employee’s brand sabotage behaviour (BSB) and the influencing factors of BSB in the hotels and their partner travel agencies from the perspective of perceived justice and establishes a moderating mechanism based on emotional resource supplementation.

This paper developed a measurement scale of BSB through interviews with hotel employees and multiple rounds of questionnaire surveys in Study 1 and tested the research model and hypotheses using a structural equation model analysis in Study 2.

The results of multiple rounds of surveys indicate that a positive perception of procedural justice helps to restrain employees from implementing BSB but the employee’s perceived customer injustice can directly stimulate not only the BSB but also reduce employees’ perception of the level of procedural justice. However, when employees’ self-efficacy for emotional regulation is higher, the positive relationship between customer injustice and BSB and the negative impact on procedural justice is weakened.

The findings suggest that managers should implement practices to suppress BSB by actively managing the service interaction process and reduce the instances of unjust customer behaviours, while preventing employees from sabotaging brands at both organizational and employee levels by promoting organizational procedural justice and employees’ self-efficacy for emotional regulation.

The research results enrich the discussion on the integration of resources in the process of value co-creation and the common sabotage of brand value caused by resource abuse. Further, this study also supplements and perfects the theory of service brand management.

People develop general stereotypes and beliefs about how people look and behave, and discrepancies in perceptions of warmth and competence can lead to incongruence in expected behaviors during service interactions. These perceptions can contribute to negative outcomes for employees; therefore, this study aims to examine how perceptions of warmth affect both customer reactions to employees who are Asian and the work stress, strain and attitudes of employees who are Asian toward their jobs.

To investigate the phenomenon, the authors conducted three studies. The first study examined whether occupational-racial stereotypes influence customers’ evaluation of employees’ service recovery performance. The second study temporally examined whether employees who are Asian engage in more emotional labor strategies to counter these occupational-racial stereotypes and as a result experience more negative outcomes. And a third study investigated the cumulative effects of negative perceptions on employee outcomes.

The results suggest employees in the hospitality industry who are Asian are perceived as less warm during service failure interactions and, thus, must work harder to regulate their emotions. As a result, employees who are Asian reported experiencing more negative outcomes, supporting the notion that occupational-racial stereotypes contribute to racial disparity and act as challenges and barriers for employees in the service industry.

These findings emphasize the need to understand and address occupational-racial stereotypes for employees who are Asian to mitigate racial disparities in the service industry. Organizations can promote diverse work climates, provide emotional support and foster high-quality relationships to support employee well-being and satisfaction.

The results provide insight into how stereotypical warmth perceptions of employees who are Asian may affect the demands they face when engaging in service recovery, and how these increased demands may reduce the quality of their work experiences.

Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a vital role in work and non-work outcomes. Gaps exist in the role of contextual factor (i.e. perceived organisational support, POS) and personal resource (i.e. psychological capital, PsyCap) in investigating employees’ EI. This current research draws on the cognitive–motivational–reactional theory of emotions and conservation of resources theory in examining the serial explanatory pathways between EI and work engagement.

Data were collected at three points of measurement from the public sector in Nigeria. The authors tested their serial mediation model with a sample of 528 public sector employees using PROCESS macro with a bias-corrected bootstrapping method.

The findings show that EI was positively related to work engagement. EI exerted an indirect effect on PsyCap via POS. The indirect effect of EI on work engagement was serially mediated by POS and PsyCap.

Organisations need to pay attention to the level of support they provide to employees, given that employees differ in their emotional appraisal and regulations. The way employees perceive organisational support is vital to helping them stimulate their personal resources towards work goals. This study further accentuates the fact that emotionally intelligent employees tend to understand how to manage their emotions and that of others in a way that leads to a higher level of work engagement.

This paper addresses gaps in the literature on EI and regulations in the changing and challenging world of work. In so doing, this paper contributes to the literature by deepening our understanding of the complex relationship between EI, POS, PsyCap and work engagement. Theoretical and practical implications for employees’ emotional appraisal and regulations are discussed.

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether and how the perceived organizational support (POS) influences emotional labor and the relationship between emotional labor and flight attendants' outcomes.

Structural equation modeling analysis provided support for the hypotheses from a sample of 256 flight attendants in South Korea.

The results showed that POS has a positive effect on deep acting. Furthermore, it was found that surface acting has a positive influence on emotional exhaustion, whereas deep acting has a negative influence on emotional exhaustion. In addition, emotional exhaustion has a negative influence on organizational commitment, while organizational commitment has a negative influence on turnover intention. Furthermore, POS moderated the relationship between deep acting or surface acting and emotional exhaustion.

The current study broadened the conceptual work and laboratory studies in emotional labor by examining the role of POS on emotional regulation strategies related to emotional exhaustion. In addition, this study sheds new light on customer service management within the airline industry by examining flight attendants' emotional labor, particularly interactions with POS.

This daily diary study aims to examine the influences of daily poor sleep quality on employees’ emotional exhaustion at work via negative affect at home. Additionally, this study examines the moderating effects of day-level customer mistreatment and person-level workplace mindfulness in hotel frontline employees’ daily spillover from the nonwork domain to the work domain.

An experience sampling method was applied, and the survey data were collected from 98 frontline service employees in the hotel industry in China. This study included a one-time initial survey and a ten-day daily diary study.

This study reveals that frontline service employees’ poor sleep quality of the previous night influences their emotional exhaustion after work through negative affect at home. On days when employees perceived a low level of customer mistreatment, the daily positive association between negative affect at home and emotional exhaustion after work would be attenuated. Moreover, employees with a higher level of workplace mindfulness are less likely to be influenced by the negative affect at home.

This study suggests that hospitality organizations should extend their focus on caring about employees’ nonwork life quality, such as improving daily sleep quality and providing workplace mindfulness trainings.

This study adds to the current literature on work and nonwork spillover by considering the spillover process from employees’ nonwork domains to work domains by taking a dynamic and multilevel perspective.