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Customer incivility is commonplace across service industries. Yet, there is little that is known about how uncivil customers affect employees. The purpose of this study is to examine how uncivil customer interactions affect employees’ cynicism, depersonalization and job performance.

Study 1 uses the qualitative critical incident technique to content analyze employee perceptions of customer incivility and how it affects their job performance. Study 2 uses a 2 (incivility frequency: high vs low) × 2 (co-worker support: high vs low) × 2 (service rule commitment: high vs low) quasi-experimental between-subjects design.

Results find that there is a significant interaction effect of customer incivility frequency, co-worker emotional support and service rule commitment on employee cynicism and depersonalization, which leads to decreased job performance and more harmful experiences to other customers.

The findings provide practical implications on the importance of managing customer incivility, providing co-worker support and how this affects employee attitudes and service they deliver to other customers.

The results build upon the incivility, co-worker support and service rule commitment literature, conservation of resources theory, as well as identifying key variables core to hospitality and tourism research: cynicism and depersonalization that provide important implications for actions of tourism and hospitality firms.

In this chapter, we summarize and build on the current state of the customer mistreatment literature in an effort to further future research on this topic. First, we detail the four primary conceptualizations of customer mistreatment. Second, we present a multilevel model of customer mistreatment, which distinguishes between the unfolding processes at the individual employee level and the service encounter level. In particular, we consider the antecedents and outcomes unique to each level of analysis as well as mediators and moderators. Finally, we discuss important methodological concerns and recommendations for future research.

While the positive effects of customer citizenship behavior are well established, research on its potential negative consequences is scarce. This study aims to examine the indirect relationship between customer citizenship and dysfunctional customers via customer moral credits and entitlement, as well as the moderating influence of customer citizenship fatigue.

Study 1 employed a cross-sectional design with a self-administered survey. The data were collected from 314 customers using an online research panel. In Study 2, the authors manipulated customer citizenship behavior using 203 participants to establish causality and rule out alternative explanations of the findings of Study 1. In Study 3, the authors replicated Study 2 and enhanced internal validity by using a more controlled experimental design using 128 participants.

This study shows that when customer citizenship fatigue is high, customer citizenship behavior elicits customer moral credit, which leads to customer entitlement and, in turn, promotes dysfunctional customer behavior. Conversely, when customer citizenship fatigue is low, customer citizenship behavior does not generate moral credit or entitlement, preventing dysfunctional customer behavior.

The study shows that promoting customer citizenship behavior does not always lead to positive outcomes. Therefore, when promoting customer citizenship behavior, managers should consider the psychological licensing process and ways to mitigate the influence of moral credits.

This study challenges common wisdom and investigates the dark side of customer citizenship behavior. Specifically, it demonstrates that customer citizenship behavior could backfire (e.g. dysfunctional customer behavior). It also shows that only customers who experience a high level of fatigue from their citizenship behaviors are psychologically licensed to gain moral credit, leading to dysfunctional customer behavior.

Integrating conservation of resources (COR) and complexity theories, this study aims to develop and assess a research model of the relationship between job dissatisfaction and brand sabotage behavior (BSB) based on the moderating mechanism of psychological resources (i.e. brand-based role identity and relational energy). The interdependence between these influencing factors is analyzed from the perspective of social science holism.

A total of 381 valid questionnaires were collected from frontliners serving in full-service restaurants in Guangzhou, China. Regression analysis was used to test the research hypotheses and combined with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the complex triggering mechanism of BSB.

Job dissatisfaction is positively related to BSB, brand-based role identity internalization and relational energy weaken this effect, whereas brand-based role identity compliance strengthens it. Qualitative comparative analysis shows that a single condition does not constitute a necessary condition for BSB. The interdependence of job dissatisfaction and employee psychological resources forms multiple asymmetric paths that trigger high and low BSB.

The findings can be used by catering organizations as guidelines for conducting training for brand internalization, formulating strategies to avoid BSB among employees and strengthening brand building.

This study is the first to integrate COR and complexity theories to comprehensively analyze how BSB is formed among dissatisfied employees. The authors advance theory by distinguishing the role of brand psychological resources (i.e. brand-based role identity) and psychological resources obtained from the environment (i.e. relational energy) in stimulating or buffering dissatisfied employees to engage in BSB.

Hotel employees’ occupational stigma is often overlooked. Exploration of hotel employees’ occupational stigma representations, perception pathways and destigmatization provides an empirical basis for positive organizational behavior and psychology in the hotel industry. Therefore, this study aims to better understand the mechanism underlying inherent of occupational stigma.

This study adopts a five-factor narrative analysis involving stigma narrative interviews with a purposed sampling of hotel employees (n = 18). Based on occupational stigma and resource conservation theories, this study designed a five-factor narrative analysis structure chart as the basis for data analysis.

Findings indicate the existence of four quadrants of perceived occupational stigma attribute distribution, two paths of perceived occupational stigma formation and a more systematic occupational destigmatization mechanism path.

The occupational destigmatization path and countermeasures proposed in this study can resolve talent drain and eliminate stereotyping in the hotel industry, which promote the industry’s rapid recovery and sustainable healthy development, providing the practical management guidelines for public communication via social media, and offer practical significance for existing hotel human resource management in modules such as organizational culture and training.

This study broadens investigations of occupational stigma in a single, static context and explains the relationship between hotel employees’ stigma perceptions and destigmatization paths. Further, the mechanism of emotional energy distribution on spatial stigma was identified. These results have practical implications for organizational culture, training and employee care in hotel human resource management.

Relationships are socially constructed by companies in interaction. This study explains the dynamic character of business-to-business relationships with the aid of rules theory, a theory borrowed from the communications field. Two forms of rules are identified: constitutive rules guide the interpretation of the other's acts, and regulative rules guide the appropriate response to the interpreted act. Rules theory asserts that companies act as if applying these rules. Relationships provide not only the context in which the parties’ acts are performed but are also the result of such acts. Thus, relationships are potentially reshaped each time one party performs an act and the other party gives meaning to that act and reacts.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This research investigates the impact of customer rule violation issues on frontline employees' (FLEs’) burnout due-to-customers. A model and hypotheses are developed using COR theory and past literature on misbehaving customers and their effects on customer-facing employees.

The proposed model was assessed using a survey of 840 frontline retail, restaurant, service and caregiving employees and their reactions to the issue of misbehaving customers (i.e. rule breaking and/or rude customers).

FLEs' perceived frequency of customer rule violations, FLEs' concerns with misbehaving customers and FLEs' concerns with enforcing rules with these customers increased FLEs' burnout due-to-customers, while FLEs' customer orientation decreased it. Interactions among several antecedents were found relative to their effects on burnout. Burnout due-to-customers decreased FLEs' organizational commitment and increased quitting intentions. Additionally, this burnout mediated the relationships between our studied antecedents and job outcome variables (either partially or fully), with organizational commitment also mediating the relationship between burnout and quitting intentions.

The impact of FLEs' concerns relative to customers' rule breaking, which has not been previously addressed, is shown to increase FLEs' burnout due-to-customers, while FLEs' customer orientation buffered and reduced burnout, with frequency of violations interacting with several antecedents, and ultimately affecting burnout and several dependent variables—organizational commitment and quitting intentions. These FLE rule violation and enforcement concerns, captured at the height of the pandemic, are new variables to the literature. These issues have important implications for managers as to their treatment and training of FLEs in the future.

To provide the key findings of a WTO Panel regarding Mexico's commitments in basic telecommunications service in a way that will help telecom regulators and government policy makers implement their WTO commitments and to respond to criticism of the panel's findings.

The article assists government policy makers and telecommunications regulatory authorities to understand the WTO Panel's decision which concluded that Mexico failed to carry out its WTO obligations in basic telecom services. It analyzes the WTO Panel decision and articles criticizing the decision, reviews relevant WTO documents and draws on the author's participation in the WTO basic telecom services negotiations. It provides a brief introduction to the relevant WTO agreements, describes the key findings of the WTO Panel and lessons for telecom regulators and policy makers based on those findings, sets out the claims made by the USA against Mexico, and describes the WTO Panel findings. The article also includes a response to criticisms leveled against the WTO Panel decision.

The WTO Panel decision provides important guidance in interpreting the scope of obligations in cross‐border supply of international telecom services, cost‐oriented interconnection, access to and use of the public switched network on reasonable terms and conditions and the scope of anti‐competitive conduct that needs to be regulated. Much of the criticism of the WTO Panel decision is based on incorrect interpretation of WTO obligations, lack of knowledge of the negotiating history and exaggerated readings of the panel decision.

The WTO Panel decision clarifies many of the most important WTO obligations related to basic telecom services. Government policy makers and regulatory authorities need to understand the WTO Panel decision as they take action to implement their own WTO obligations and as they consider undertaking new obligations.

The article offers practical advice to government policy makers and regulatory authorities on how to implement their WTO commitments in basic telecom services.