Working in a public service position that requires regular interactions with outsider stakeholders can be particularly stressful for frontline workers (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002) because these individuals need to follow specific display rules (e.g., ‘The customer is always right!). Recent work in public administration (Tummers, Bekkers, Vink, & Musheno, 2015) indicates that frontline workers employ three specific coping strategies when interacting with the public (i.e., responses in which they try to tolerate or reduce stress): routinizing (responding in a standardized way), rule-bending (meeting the client’s demands) and aggression (confronting clients in a hostile manner). I build on this work to understand frontline workers’ coping strategies when dealing with uncivil customers. Customer incivility involves rude behaviors (e.g., making unreasonable or excessive demand) perpetrated by persons external to the organization.
In particular, I investigate the impact of customer incivility on workers’ service quality, customer-directed aggression and task performance. In so doing, I examine whether workers’ public service motivation (PSM) helps buffer the potentially deleterious effects of customer rudeness. A recent study on PSM and emotional labor (Hsieh, Yang, & Fu, 2012) found that employees with high PSM tend to use ‘deep acting’ (i.e., modifying one’s true feelings to feel a desired emotion when dealing with the public) to conform to expectations of appropriate emotional displays. Additionally, given men’s tendency towards aggression (Hershcovis & Barling, 2007), I propose that the moderating effect of PSM may be more pronounced among male workers. Based on a sample of 401 municipal and district workers in 83 work units in Thailand, the multi-level analyses reveal a three-way interaction among customer incivility, PSM and gender, such that only male workers with low PSM respond negatively to uncivil customers by lowering their service quality and task performance. This present study provides an integration of research on public service delivery, customer incivility, emotional labor and PSM. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.
References
Brotheridge, C. M., & Grandey, A. A. (2002). Emotional labor and burnout: Comparing two perspectives of “people work”. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60(1), 17-39.
Hershcovis, M. S., & Barling, J. (2007). Towards a relational model of workplace aggression. In J. Langan-Fox, C. L. Cooper & R. Klimoski (Eds.), Research companion to the dysfunctional workplace: Management challenges and symptoms (pp. 268-284). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Hsieh, C.-W., Yang, K., & Fu, K.-J. (2012). Motivational Bases and Emotional Labor: Assessing the Impact of Public Service Motivation. Public Administration Review, 72(2), 241-251.
Tummers, L. L., Bekkers, V., Vink, E., & Musheno, M. (2015). Coping during public service delivery: A conceptualization and systematic review of the literature. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
