Faculty of Management.
Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Division.
J Appl Psychol. 2014 Jan;99(1):151-61. doi: 10.1037/a0034350. Epub 2013 Sep 23.
Incivility between customers and employees is common in many service organizations. These encounters can have negative outcomes for employees, customers, and the organization. To date, researchers have tended to study incivility as an aggregated and accumulated phenomenon (entity perspective). In the present study, we examined incivility as it occurs during a specific service encounter (event perspective) alongside the entity perspective. Using a mixed-method multilevel field study of customer service interactions, we show that individual customer incivility encounters (i.e., events) trigger employee incivility as a function of the employee's overall accumulated impression of the (in)civility in his or her customer interactions, such that the effects are more pronounced among employees who generally perceive their customer interactions to be more versus less civil. We also find that these interactive effects occur only among employees who are lower (vs. higher) in negative affectivity. Our results show that, in order to expand the understanding of customer incivility, it is important to study the incivility encounter, the social context in which negative customer interactions occur, and individual differences.
在许多服务型组织中，顾客与员工之间的不礼貌行为很常见。这些遭遇可能会给员工、顾客和组织带来负面影响。迄今为止，研究人员倾向于将不礼貌行为作为一种聚合和累积的现象进行研究（实体视角）。在本研究中，我们从特定服务遭遇的角度（事件视角），同时结合实体视角，研究了不礼貌行为。我们采用混合方法多层次实地研究了客户服务互动，结果表明，顾客不礼貌行为的个体遭遇（即事件）会引发员工的不礼貌行为，这是员工对其顾客互动中不礼貌行为的整体累积印象的函数，因此，对于那些普遍认为自己的顾客互动更不文明的员工，这种影响更为明显。我们还发现，这些互动效应只发生在那些消极情感倾向较低（而非较高）的员工中。我们的研究结果表明，为了拓展对顾客不礼貌行为的理解，研究不礼貌遭遇、负面顾客互动发生的社会背景以及个体差异非常重要。
