They were uncivil, and now I am too: a dual process model exploring relations between customer incivility and instigated incivility
Files
Date
2023-10
DOI
Authors
Hughes, Ian M.
Lee, Juseob
Hong, Junyoung
Currie, Richard
Jex, Steve M.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
I.M. Hughes, J. Lee, J. Hong, R. Currie, S.M. Jex. 2023. "They were uncivil, and now I am too: A dual process model exploring relations between customer incivility and instigated incivility." Stress and Health, Volume 39, Issue 4, pp.766-781. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3221
Abstract
Incivility from customers is a common occurrence for employees working in service-oriented organizations. Typically, such incivility engenders instigated mistreatment, both towards customers and colleagues. Not much is understood, however, about the mechanisms underlying the relations between customer incivility and instigated incivility. Answering recent calls from incivility scholars, the present research, drawing from Self-Regulatory Resource Theory and Stressor-Emotion models of workplace behaviour, explored cognitive (i.e., self-regulatory resource depletion) and affective (i.e., negative affect) pathways that would explain relations between customer incivility and instigated incivility towards others. Through two multi-wave studies with different time lags (N1 = 180, weekly lags; N2 = 192, within-week lags) and different operationalizations of the instigated incivility construct (i.e., broad [unidimensional] and narrow [multidimensional]), we find consistent support for the mediating effects of the affective pathway. While our first study finds that customer incivility is linked to broad instigated incivility through negative affect, our second study finds that customer incivility is linked to, more specifically, gossip, exclusionary behaviour, and hostility through negative affect. In both studies, however, no support was found for the mediating effects of the cognitive pathway. Implications for both research and practice are discussed, and future research directions are offered.
Description
License
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, pro-vided the original work is properly cited. © 2023 The Authors. Stress and Health published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd