This study investigates the conditions under which service employees can react positively after encountering customer incivility. Building on the work engagement theory, we hypothesize that customer incivility interacts with workplace social support (i.e., perceived supervisor and co-worker support) to influence work engagement, which in turn leads to extra-role customer service. We test our model within the context of hotels. The results of a two-wave survey with a sample of 198 frontline service employees provide support for most of the hypotheses. In particular, the findings show that employees encountering uncivil customer interactions provide extra-role customer service only when they have high (vs. low) supervisor support. Work engagement mediates the conditional effect of customer incivility on extra-role customer service. The results thus suggest that supervisors play a vital role in encouraging employees’ positive reaction toward customer incivility. This work has notable implications for hospitality management research.

Introduction

Customer interaction is at the heart of everyday life of frontline hospitality employees. With ever increasing level of service expectations, customers can easily get upset at the slightest delay of service delivery, such as waiting to check-in, slow Wi-Fi, tardy room service, etc. Frontline service employees are usually the punching bags of the dissatisfied customers and become targets of customers’ impolite and uncivil treatment (Cortina et al., 2001; Wilson and Holmvall, 2013). Customer incivility, a violation of social norms (e.g., respect and courtesy), is a mild but one of the most frequent hassles service employees experience on a daily basis (Kern and Grandey, 2009; Wilson and Holmvall, 2013). More than 70 percent of employees have come across incidents of uncivil customers (Cortina et al., 2001; Sliter et al., 2010). This phenomenon is disconcerting given the wide array of deleterious outcomes to both service employees and organizations as a result of customer incivility (Sliter et al., 2010, 2012; Walker et al., 2014). To avoid negative impacts of customer incivility, organizations need to be vigilant about employees’ reactions so that effective interventions can be designed (Cortina and Magley, 2009). Since prior studies have primarily focused on the adverse consequences for targets of customer incivility, such as emotional exhaustion and burnout (e.g., Kern and Grandey, 2009; Sliter et al., 2010; Han et al., 2016), we know remarkably little about what factors may fuel employees’ positive reactions. This dearth is unfortunate because coping actions of service employees have been found to result in better service quality, positive word-of-mouth, and customer loyalty (Lewis and McCann, 2004). As such, it is vital for organizations to find ways to encourage their frontline employees to defuse potentially escalating situations by proactively working with customers, such as offering prompt assistance (Bettencourt and Brown, 1997; Hoffman et al., 1995; Mohr and Bitner, 1995).