The Impact of Customer Incivility and Its Consequences on Hotel Employees: Mediating Role of Employees’ Emotional Exhaustion

Abstract

Employees’ negative outcomes have continued to be the logical position emphasized by service-oriented organizations that ‘the customer is always right’ and organizational policies that require employees to make customers happy, even in situations involving a customer’s uncivil behavior. The current study builds and evaluates a research model that analyzes the associations among customer incivility, employees’ emotional exhaustion, employees’ intentions to quit the workplace, and employees’ satisfaction at the workplace using the conservation of resources theory. Employees from four- and five-star hotels in Pakistan. The data shows that customers’ incivility boosts employees’ emotional exhaustion and employees’ intentions to quit the workplace, but intentions have no effect on employees’ satisfaction at the workplace when using structural equation modeling. The results show that employees’ emotional exhaustion slightly mediates customers’ incivility influence on employees’ intentions to quit the workplace while totally mediating customers’ incivility effect on employees’ satisfaction at the workplace. The findings’ implications, limitations, and future directions are examined.