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

Farrukh Shahzad, Shahab Ali, Iftikhar Hussain, Li Sun (), Chunlei Wang and Fayyaz Ahmad
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Farrukh Shahzad: School of Economics and Management, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, Maoming 525011, China
Shahab Ali: School of Economics and Business Administration, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400050, China
Iftikhar Hussain: Faculty of Management Sciences, University of Kotli, Azad Jammu and Kashmir 11000, Pakistan
Li Sun: School of Economics and Management, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, Maoming 525011, China
Chunlei Wang: School of Economics and Management, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, Maoming 525011, China
Fayyaz Ahmad: School of Economics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 21, 1-14

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.

Keywords: customer incivility; employee’s intention; customer uncivil behavior; emotional exhaustion; Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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