The Impact Of Customer Incivility On Hotel Front-line Service Employees' Proactive Customer Service Performance

With the rapid development of the service industry in recent years,the buyer's market has occupied the dominant position.Most service enterprises implement the customer-oriented service strategy,provoking the unequal interaction between customers and front-line service employees(FLEs).The frequent uncivil treatment suffered by FLEs from the customers have brought enormous negative impact on FLEs?Customer Incivility,as a research branch of workplace incivility,has raised the wide attention of researchers both from home and abroad.Many researchers have been exploring the impacts of customer incivility as a stressor from the outside of the organization on FLEs' emotion,attitude and behavior.On the other hand,FLEs'proactive customer service performance(PCSP)has become the key point of service enterprises' survival in today's fierce competition among service industry.Thus,the focus of this study is to explore how customer incivility will influence FLEs' PCSP.Based on the Affective Events Theory(AET)and the Conservation of Resource(COR)theory,this study examined the influencing mechanism of customer incivility on PCSP,and built a theoretical framework with harmonious work passion as the mediator and hostile attribution bias as the moderator.Multistage and multisource data was collected from 274 FLEs in 3 hotels in the southern part of China and proper method was used to analyze the data and test the hypothesis.The results demonstrated that:(1)Customer incivility had a significant negative impact on PCSP.(2)Harmonious work passion partially mediated the relationship between customer incivility and PCSP.(3)Hostile attribution bias played a moderating role between customer incivility and harmonious work passion.(4)Hostile attribution bias moderated the indirect effect of customer incivility and PCSP through harmonious work passion.On the one hand,this study advances the research on the outcomes of customer incivility by examining the "extra-role" behavior(i.e.PCSP)of FLEs.On the other hand,this study enriches the research on the antecedents of PCSP by exploring the external factor of the organization(i.e.customer incivility).Moreover,this study proposes several management tactics for the service enterprises from the perspective of human resource management.