Protecting Workers From Rude Customers to Enhance Organizational Identification in Emotional Labor Environments: A Study With Call Center Agents

Challenges faced by call centers in managing capacity, efficiency, service speed and quality, training, emotional labor, and turnover are intrinsically intertwined. Call center agents are considered frontline workers, and as such, they often deal with hostile behavior from rude customers. However, they are expected to suppress their feelings and maintain a courteous demeanor despite rude customer behavior, which results in emotional dissonance. Such working environments, where the frontline workers experience emotional dissonance, are termed emotional labor environments. Emotional dissonance, if sustained over a long period of time, can lead to an erosion of organizational identification (OID) among agents, unless they perceive adequate protection and support from the management. A low OID can lead to high employee turnover, which in turn results in high recruitment and training costs as well as loss of experience and compromised service quality. In this study, we examine how employee protection policies and leadership style manifest in mitigating the erosion of OID. We develop a research framework to understand the mediating role of agents’ perception of the efficacy of the firm's policies to protect them from rude customers and the relevant aspects of the servant leadership style of supervisors in mitigating the erosion of agents’ OID caused by the cumulative emotional dissonance over their tenure duration. For this study, we partner with a major multinational firm in Korea in the insurance industry. We find that the perceived organizational support for protection from rude customers and supervisors’ servant leadership style are positively related to agents’ OID. The agent's OID decreases with their tenure duration, unless mediated by the agent's perception of the efficacy of protection from rude customers. We provide insights for the retention of agents with implications for capacity and service quality for the call centers. These insights may be extended to frontline workers in other emotional labor environments.