Challenge or hindrance? How frontline employees appraise and respond to customer incivility

While most customer service interactions are civil in nature, retail frontline employees (FLEs) often face customers who behave in unfriendly, insulting, or disrespectful ways, which can harm FLEs and the organization. Prior research typically treats such incivility as an inherently harmful hindrance stressor with uniformly negative consequences. Drawing on the transactional theory of stress, we reconceptualize customer incivility as a dual stressor that can be appraised as either a challenge or a hindrance. Using multisource data from 241 FLEs, 34 supervisors, and archival performance records of a large retail banking chain, we find that when FLEs view customer incivility as a challenge it enhances proactive work behavior, which then positively influences FLE performance. In contrast, when FLEs view customer incivility as a hindrance, it increases counterproductive work behavior, which negatively influences FLE performance. Thus, the same uncivil customer behavior can elicit different behavioral and performance consequences depending on how it is appraised by an FLE. Moreover, by integrating conservation of resources theory, we show that internal psychological resources (such as empathy and grit) and external organizational resources (such as employee bonuses) moderate how appraisal tendencies translate into proactive versus counterproductive work behavior.