Customer Injustice and Service Employees' Responses: A Social Exchange Perspective

Recent research has uncovered the debilitating effect that customers’ unfair treatment of service workers has for both employees and their employers. These studies have largely explained the effects of customer mistreatment through a conservation of resources (COR) theory lens, arguing that customer injustice depletes the regulatory resources of service employees, thereby impairing their well-being and ability to perform their job effectively. In our paper, we posit that the psychological process is more complex than this explication. That is, we argue that aspects of the employee-customer social exchange relationship must also be considered, and that such relational processes are critical above and beyond COR effects. After formulating our theoretical model, we offer time-lagged data from two studies of service workers supporting our hypotheses that customer injustice predicts employee turnover intentions (Study 1, N = 182) and citizenship behavior directed toward customers (Study 2, N = 337), and that these effects are mediated by perceived customer support and customer commitment, respectively, while controlling for COR effects. Incorporating insights from the customer service literature, we further demonstrate the role of display rule perceptions as a moderator of these sequential indirect effects.