Take It or Leave: Customer Incivility and Intention to Quit in New-Hire Frontline Hospitality Employees

The hospitality industry, comprised of lodging, food, beverage, travel, tourism, recreation, and events, has one of the highest turnover rate and lowest tenure of all industries. Prior academic research focused on the construct of burnout as the predominant cause of employee exodus over the long term. Little attention has been given to turnover among new workers. The purpose of this study was to examine the bivariate relationships of customer incivility as perceived by newly hired frontline hospitality workers, to intention to quit, employee's age, and amount of work time per week. The theoretical framework included turnover theories, concepts of occupational stress, cognitive dissonance, emotional labor, and psychological resilience. The researcher collected data via online survey from a convenience sample of 121 participants using Wilson and Holmvall's Incivility from Customers Scale and Bothma and Roodt's Turnover Intention Scale. Data analysis involved Kendall's tau-b correlations. The results showed direct correlations between perceived level of customer incivility and turnover intention (taub = 0.33, p < .01), age and amount of time worked (taub = 0.21, p < .01), age and intention to quit (taub = 0.14, p < .05), and between hours worked per week and perceived customer incivility (taub = 0.13, p < .05). The findings provided empirical evidence that exposure to negative customer behavior could be a factor in the short tenure of newly hired employees, and builds a case for the need for further research on this understudied population.