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Despite workplace cheating behavior is common and costly, little research has explored its antecedents from customers' perspective. The current study aims to investigate the indirect mechanisms between customer mistreatment and cheating behavior, and exam the moderated role of traditionality.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, the authors examine how customer mistreatment affects workplace cheating behavior. They test their hypotheses using a time-lagged field study of 183 employees.

The results show that customer mistreatment is positively related to interpersonal conflict with customers, which positively affects workplace cheating behavior. Traditionality moderates the indirect effect of customer mistreatment on workplace cheating behavior.

This study calls for researchers' attention to exploring the antecedents of workplace cheating behavior from customers' perspective, and first provides empirical evidence on the relationship between customer mistreatment and workplace cheating behavior, which has never been examined.

This study mainly aims to examine the mediating effect of perceived organizational support (POS) and the moderating effect of locus of control and job autonomy on the relationship between customer mistreatment behavior and organizational citizenship behavior.

Through a questionnaire survey of 231 employees and their direct supervisors of five hotels in Guangzhou. This paper analyzed five variables (customer mistreatment, POS, locus of control, job autonomy and organizational citizenship behavior) relationships through a variety of data analysis.

Results indicate that customer mistreatment behavior has a negative effect on employees’ organizational citizenship behavior. The relationship between customer mistreatment behavior and employees’ organizational citizenship behavior is partially mediated by employees’ POS. Staffs’ locus of control and job autonomy can modulate the relationship between customers’ mistreatment behavior and POS. Furthermore, the indirect mediating effect of POS on customer mistreatment behavior is revealed. The organizational citizenship behavior linkage is significant only to staff who perceived they have a high level of job autonomy and a high locus of control.

Hotels are advised to provide organizational support and the management of customer mistreatment behavior so as to reflect their employees’ value, seek service innovation and promote production efficiency in practice. Furthermore, it maintains and promotes operational efficiency for service organizations and means the organization pays more attention to meet the social, emotional and psychological needs of its employees.

This article reveals the mechanism relationship between customer mistreatment behavior and employee organizational citizenship behavior. First, it defines the concept of customer mistreatment in the hotel industry and enriches the related research. Second, the study, from the perspective of customer mistreatment, has opened up a new view of organizational citizenship behavior research. Third, we built a research model and it is helpful to grasp the inner mechanism between customer mistreatment and employees’ organizational citizenship behavior. Fourth, this research benefits service organizations so as to maintain and improve their operation efficiency. Furthermore, it can have theoretical guidance for service-oriented organizations to develop a harmonious consumption culture and organizational culture.

This article, the first empirical study of its kind, presents findings from a larger qualitative study of principal mistreatment of teachers. A grounded theory method was used to study a sample of 50 US teachers who were subjected to long‐term mistreatment from school principals. The authors discuss descriptive, conceptual, and theoretical findings about principals’ actions that teachers define as mistreatment. In addition, the inductively derived model briefly looks at the harmful effects of principal mistreatment and abuse on teachers, psychologically/emotionally and physically/physiologically. Implications of study findings are discussed for administrator and teacher preparation, for school district offices, and for further research.

This study seeks to identify 172 American elementary, middle, and high school teachers' perceptions of the major sources and intensity of the experience of mistreatment by a principal, the effects of such mistreatment, how these perceptions varied by demographic variables, teachers' coping skills, and teachers' perceptions of contributing factors.

Participants completed a piloted, validated online questionnaire.

The participants reported experiencing a wide range of abusive principal behaviors that resulted in serious or extensive harmful psychological/emotional, physical/physiological, and work‐related effects to themselves, their work, and their families. An overwhelming majority (77 percent) indicated they would leave their job for another because of the harm caused by the principal's mistreatment. Mistreated teachers typically did not enact problem‐focused coping strategies. Differences were found among teachers of various demographic categories for several variables.

The findings of this current, quantitative study expand the authors' earlier qualitative research on the topic of teacher mistreatment; these are the only studies on this topic completed in the USA. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are included.

Contextual factors play a vital role in employee mistreatment. This chapter deals with the definition and scope of contextual factors, including a distinction between the objective environment and its idiosyncratic perception by employees. Several mechanisms are offered to explain the effects of context on mistreatment, including the stressor–strain framework, interaction with personal characteristics, and also mistreatment acting as a stressor. The framework suggested in this chapter uses levels of analysis, and proposes that the objective environment (group level variables) is perceived at the individual level, which consequently leads to both perpetrated and received mistreatment. Those same objective environment variables also have a direct effect on mistreatment, as well as a moderating role in the relationship between individually perceived context and mistreatment. Furthermore, there is some evidence that mistreatment acts as a contextual variable in and of itself, with perpetrators, victims, and bystanders perceiving mistreatment in their workplace and reporting higher levels of stressors and strains. Finally, we outline the need for more longitudinal, multi-level studies to clearly discern the role of context in employee mistreatment.

The issue of customer mistreatment in food and retail sectors has come under the spotlight during the COVID-19 crisis. The purpose of this paper is to examine the problem in the COVID-19 pandemic context and study its implications for employee counterproductive behavior in the workplace. Specifically, this study aims to investigate the relationship between customer mistreatment and employee counterproductive behavior by considering the mediating role of cognitive rumination and moderating role of servant leadership at coffee cafés that operated during the COVID-19 smart lockdown period.

Structured questionnaires were distributed to 479 frontline staff working at cafés and coffee shops located in two large cities of Pakistan. The questionnaire data were analyzed by using bootstrapped regression procedures to determine how the investigated variables influenced counterproductive work behavior during the pandemic.

The findings revealed a positive influence of customer mistreatment on counterproductive work behavior both directly as well as indirectly in the presence of employee rumination as a mediator. Furthermore, the presence of servant leadership at cafés and coffee shops was found to moderate the impact of customer mistreatment during the pandemic.

The study offers a novel insight into the relationships between mistreatment by customers, counterproductive work behavior, employee rumination and servant leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic context, hitherto unexplored.

Drawing on the self-cognitive theory, this study aims to propose a conceptual model that links customer mistreatment with different types of helping behaviors through the self-efficacy mechanism.

The empirical analysis made use of the original data of three hotels located in southern China. The authors tested the hypotheses with a three-wave survey of a sample of 430 frontline workers in 95 groups.

Customer mistreatment may reduce employees’ self-efficacy, which has both positive and negative effects depending on the type of helping. Moreover, the coworkers’ supporting climate buffered the influence of self-efficacy on autonomous and dependent helping.

The authors resolve the ambiguity surrounding customer mistreatment-helping and self-efficacy-helping relations. Thus, the authors extend the knowledge on the influence of customer mistreatment and self-efficacy on helping behaviors by establishing that both positive and negative effects may exist depending on the type of helping. Moreover, this study identifies the predictive role of self-efficacy in autonomous and dependent helping.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of perceived corporate hypocrisy on customer mistreatment behaviors within the banking industry and the moderating effects of customer–company identification (CCI) and brand equity on the hypocrisy-mistreatment behavior relationship.

Using multistage sampling, 567 South Korean banking service users participated in an online survey. Structural equation modeling (confirmatory factor analysis) and hierarchical regression analysis were used to analyze the data.

Perceived corporate hypocrisy was positively related to customer mistreatment behaviors. CCI and brand equity differentially moderated the positive relationship between perceived corporate hypocrisy and customer mistreatment behaviors. Specifically, CCI and brand equity strengthened and weakened the positive relationship between perceived corporate hypocrisy and customer mistreatment behaviors, respectively.

Marketers and banking service managers should pay careful attention to customer evaluations of their social activities and communication about the ethical values and actions of their firms. Since CCI and brand equity have contrasting moderating effects on the corporate hypocrisy-aggressive behavior relationship, marketers should devise different strategies to manage the adverse effects of such corporate crises on company-identified and brand-committed customers. For example, managers should focus on customers who actively express their deep sense of disappointment or profound anger in response to corporate hypocrisy (e.g. those with high levels of CCI) because they are likely to exhibit aggressive behaviors toward the company or its employees. Managers need to devise customized relationship-recovery strategies for such customers (e.g. forging a personal connection between the customer and service provider).

The present findings delineate the adverse effects of perceived corporate hypocrisy on customer behaviors and the moderating effect of customer relationship quality on the corporate hypocrisy-mistreatment behavior relationship within the banking industry.

Frontline service employees are often subjected to customer mistreatment and considerable studies have tested outcomes of customer mistreatment. However, the importance of its antecedents is particularly underestimated. This meta-analytic paper aims to develop an overarching framework that identifies the antecedents of customer mistreatment as well as potential boundary conditions to account for observed variations reported in extant studies.

Comprehensive electronic and manual searches were performed to retrieve relevant studies on customer mistreatment, which yielded 125 articles, including 141 independent samples. Altogether, these studies included 40,151 participants. The data were analyzed through random-effect meta-analytic methods in R using the psychmeta package.

Three types of antecedents were identified. In particular, regarding employees’ demographic characteristics, age was found to be negatively correlated with customer mistreatment. Employees’ personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, positive affectivity, emotion regulation ability and self-efficacy were found to be negatively correlated with customer mistreatment, while neuroticism and negative affectivity were positively correlated with customer mistreatment. In terms of contextual factors, perceived social support and service climate were negatively related to customer mistreatment, whereas job demands were positively related to customer mistreatment. Moreover, the power distance culture and types of service industries moderated some relationships.

This meta-analytic research, drawing upon the perpetrator predation framework, proposed a new and comprehensive framework to explain why customer mistreatment occurs. It not only promoted the advancement of literature on customer mistreatment but also provided effective and targeted guidance for helping frontline service employees reduce such negative experience.

This paper aims to examine a core member-customer threat in co-operatives (co-ops) by drawing from ostracism research, assessing co-op ostracism’s impact on critical membership and relational exchange outcomes and discussing why relationship marketing research needs to pay more attention to the overlooked role of implicit mistreatment forms in customer harm-doing.

Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, ostracism in co-ops was explored, and a measurement scale for co-op ostracism was developed. In Study 2, the core conceptual model was empirically tested with data from members of three different co-ops. In Study 3, a coping strategy was integrated into an extended model and empirically tested with a new sample of co-op members.

Ostracism is present in co-ops and “poisons” crucial relational (and membership) outcomes, despite the presence of other relationship-building or relationship-destroying accounts. Coupling entitativity with cognitive capital attenuates ostracism’s impact.

Inspired by co-ops’ membership model and inherent relational advantage, this research is the first to adopt a co-op member-customer perspective and shed light on an implicit relationship-destroying factor.

Co-op decision makers might use the diagnostic tool developed in the paper to detect ostracism and fight it. Moreover, a novel coping strategy for how co-ops (or other firms) might fend off ostracism threats is offered in the article.

The present study illuminates a dark side of a relationally profuse customer context, painting a more complete picture of relationship marketing determinants. Little attention has been given to ostracism as a distinct and important social behaviour in marketing research and to co-ops as a research context.