Daily Customer Mistreatment and Employee Sabotage Against Customers:Examining Emotion and Resource Perspectives

Taking emotion and resource perspectives, we examined the daily relationship between customers’ mistreatment of employees and employee sabotage of customers, as well as employees’ individual- and unit-level emotion-based and resource-based moderators for this relationship. Multilevel analyses of daily survey data from 131 call center employees showed that daily customer mistreatment significantly predicted customer-directed sabotage. In addition, supporting the emotion perspective, employees’ negative affectivity exacerbated the effect of customer mistreatment on customer-directed sabotage, whereas employees’ self-efficacy for emotional regulation weakened such effect. Further, supporting the resource perspective, job tenure and service rule commitment both weakened the effect of customer mistreatment.