A Study On The Influences Of Customer Mistreatment On Emotional Exhaustion Of Frontline Employees In Service Enterprise

Customer mistreatment is quite common,which will cause short-term emotional distress or long-term psychological impact on frontline employees of service enterprise,and bring direct or indirect losses to service enterprise,which means high economic costs to the society.Based on different research perspectives,scholars have pointed out that there are specific forms of customer mistreatment,such as aggression,demanding requirements,uncivilization and so on,but they have not reached a consensus on whether these behaviors constitute the overall customer mistreatment,and whether the customer mistreatment is a single dimension or a multidimensional structure has never been reached.The frontline employees of service enterprise often face the social pressure source of customer mistreatment,and also bear the different role expectations from the inside and outside of the organization,which may cause the physical and mental pressure of employees and lead to role pressure.When frontline employees feel exhausted of mental and physical energy and emotional resources due to long-term high emotional tension,they will show negative depression,lack of confidence and other physical and psychological symptoms.The existing literature often explores the influence of customer mistreatment on employees from a specific perspective(such as customer aggressive behavior),and fails to fully reveal the internal mechanism of the relationship between customer mistreatment and employees' emotional exhaustion.In view of the wide existence of customer mistreatment,and with the deepening of research,more forms of specific behavior are proposed(such as customer uncivilized behavior),it is necessary to explore the possible influence of customer mistreatment on employee physical and mental health from a multidimensional perspective.The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the influence of customer mistreatment on emotional exhaustion of frontline employees in service enterprise,focusing on three main issues: whether customer mistreatment affect frontline employees' emotional exhaustion in the service enterprise? How to affect the emotional exhaustion of frontline employees? What factors buffer or regulate the emotional exhaustion of frontline employees caused by customer mistreatment? Based on the literature review and analysis of customer mistreatment,emotional exhaustion,role stress,psychological capital and other related variables,and based on the theory of affective event,resource conservation and the JD-R model,this thesis constructs a theoretical model to explore the mediation of role stress and the moderating effect of psychological capital as an active internal strength and positive resources.To carry out empirical research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion of frontline employees in service enterprise,to test the accuracy of the conceptual model,and to explain the mechanism of the influence of customer mistreatment on emotional exhaustion of frontline employees.In this study,540 survey data of frontline employees of service enterprise were obtained by questionnaire survey.SPSS statistical software was used to analyze the data and test the research hypothesis.The research conclusions are as follows:Firstly,the empirical results show that multidimensional customer mistreatment has a significant positive influence on the emotional exhaustion of frontline employees in service enterprise.Among customer mistreatment,aggression,demanding requirements and uncivilization will aggravate the emotional exhaustion of frontline employees.Few studies clearly point out the influence of customers' demanding and uncivilized behaviors on employees' emotional exhaustion.On the basis of empirical analysis,the research conclusions expand the scope of understanding the connotation of customer mistreatment,deepen the understanding of its influence results,and provide empirical evidence support for relevant theoretical views.Secondly,role stress plays an intermediate role in the relationship between customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion of frontline employees.On the whole,the role pressure partially mediates the influence of customer mistreatment on the emotional exhaustion of frontline employees in service enterprise.The sample data in this thesis shows that role ambiguity does not have this effect.Thirdly,in the positive effect of role stress on employee's emotional exhaustion,psychological capital has a negative moderating effect.Compared with employees with low psychological capital,employees with high psychological capital have less emotional exhaustion under the influence of role stress.Not only that,psychological capital also negatively regulates the mediating role of role stress in the relationship between customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion.Compared with employees with low psychological capital,the influence of customer mistreatment on emotional exhaustion through role stress is weaker in employees with high psychological capital.According to this conclusion,the following suggestions are evidently put forward: service enterprise need to make clear the right of frontline employees to deal with customer mistreatment;give full trust and support to frontline employees;pay attention to the pressure of frontline employees,fundamentally reduce their role pressure;cultivate and improve the psychological capital level of frontline employees,reduce the loss of individual resources,and ease role stress and emotional exhaustion brought about by customer mistreatment.The innovation of this study is as follows: first,the empirical results show that multidimensional customer mistreatment has a significant impact on emotional exhaustion of frontline employees,and it is further found that through the intermediary role of role stress,demanding requirements have a greater impact on emotional exhaustion.Secondly,from the perspective of external stressors,the paper proposes that role stress play an intermediary role,which provides empirical evidence that stress perception mechanism plays a role in the influence of customer mistreatment,and also extends the antecedent variables of employee emotional exhaustion from internal factors to external factors.Thirdly,to explore the regulating effect of psychological capital,psychological capital not only negatively regulates the influence of role stress on emotional exhaustion,but also negatively regulates the mediating role of role stress in the relationship between customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion.