Daily relationships between customer incivility, organizational control, self-efficacy, and service performance

Abstract

Despite increasing research regarding the buffering conditions of customer incivility, little attention has been paid regarding how firm-driven tactics can serve as buffers between customer incivility and work outcomes. To fill this gap in the literature, our research assessed the relationship between daily customer incivility, next-morning self-efficacy as it related to next-day service performance, and the cross-level moderating effect of perceived organizational control. Using the experience sampling method, we collected diary data from 135 South Korean service employees over five consecutive working days. The results of our multilevel analyses showed that customer incivility from one day had a significant indirect effect on next-day service performance through next-morning self-efficacy. Employees’ perceptions of behavior-based organizational control mitigated the negative relationship between daily customer incivility and next-morning self-efficacy. However, perceived outcome-based organizational control did not moderate the daily customer incivility-self-efficacy relationship. These findings suggest that managing service employees with behavior-based control is more effective than using outcome-based control when helping them cope with daily customer incivility.