Service employees’ workplace incivility and career regret: Mediation of organizational dehumanization and moderation of psychological safety

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of workplace incivility has had several negative consequences for frontline service employees (FSEs). Despite ample research on FSEs' experience of workplace incivility and work consequences, the relationship between work incivility and career outcomes remains unclear. Our study aimed to examine the relationship between FSEs’ experiences of customer and coworker incivility and career regret. Based on the conservation of resources theory, we proposed organizational dehumanization as a mediator and team psychological safety as a moderator. We tested our hypotheses using three-wave surveys administered to 218 FSEs. The results demonstrated a significant indirect effect of customer and coworker incivility on career regret through organizational dehumanization. Although team psychological safety mitigated the positive association between customer incivility and organizational dehumanization, we found no moderating effect for coworker incivility. Our study contributes to the service literature by uncovering the mediating mechanism through which workplace incivility elicits career regret among FSEs and the boundary condition buffering them against the deleterious impact of workplace incivility.