Empirical Research On Customer Mistreatment And Employee Service Performance:Individual-Level And Unit-Level Moderators

"Customer is always right","Customer is the god", which is the service principle of hospitality industry for quite a long time. But actually in client-dominant service industry, it’s not a piece of news that customers overstress themselves, customers look down service employees with abusive language and shirk their own responsibilities. Customer mistreatment does harm to employee’s emotions and service performance even though it has been ignored as the organization always puts customer satisfaction first.This article mainly studies on the relation of daily customer mistreatment and employee service performance in Chinese restaurants, whether individual-level emotion-based variables, individual-level and unit-level resource-based variables play a role as moderator or not.By regression analysis from4Chinese restaurants’295daily surveys owned by a Nanjing food&beverage group, the conclusion is found that customer mistreatment significantly negatively predicts employee service performance. In addition, in terms of individual-level emotion-based variable, employees’negative affectivity exacerbates the effect of customer mistreatment on employee service performance, whereas individual-level resource-based variables employee commitment to organizational service rules and relevant job tenure weaken such effect. In terms of unit-level resource-based variables, empowerment partially weakens the effect of customer mistreatment on employee service performance, and teamwork also weakens the effect of customer mistreatment on employee service performance. But the individual-level emotion-based variable self-efficacy to emotion regulation’s moderating effect is not supported.