Does person-job fit buffer employees from rumination about customer incivility?

Abstract

Despite much research into the conditions that counteract the detrimental effect of CI on service employees, cognitive processes explaining such effects and boundary conditions remain under-researched. Our study bridges this gap by investigating the day-level association among customer incivility (CI), rumination, and job performance (JP) and the buffering effect of perceived person-job (P-J) fit in this relationship, drawing on CAT. We conducted daily surveys on 135 service employees over five consecutive workdays using multilevel analysis. As predicted, on days when service employees experienced CI, their rumination increased, which negatively affected their JP the following day. However, perceived P-J fit weakened the relationship between day-specific CI and rumination, such that only service employees who perceived low P-J fit engaged in increased rumination after experiencing CI. Furthermore, the indirect effect of CI on the following JP via rumination was significant only for service employees with a poor P-J fit.