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Customer verbal aggression describes verbal communications of anger by customers that violate the social norms of employees (Grandey et al., 2004), such as swearing, yelling, threats, condescending remarks, and sarcasm (Boyd, 2002; Grandey et al., 2007; Harris and Reynolds, 2003). Such behavior is a widespread problem. For example, frequent interactions with abusive customers are reported by flight attendants and other airline employees (Boyd, 2002). Moreover, 74 percent of flight attendants and railway employees have reported experiencing verbal abuse (e.g. sarcasm, condescending remarks, and swearing) from passengers at least once a month (Boyd, 2002). According to the literature, negative experiences by customers can have multiple negative outcomes for service workers, including high levels of employee negative emotions (Rupp et al., 2008), and employee service sabotage (Wang et al., 2011; Chi et al., 2013). Thus, how to deal with verbal aggression by customers effectively is a critical question for both researchers and practitioners.
Although prior studies have addressed how employee behaviors affect customer satisfaction and loyalty and/or how customer-employee relationships could be improved (Liao and Chuang, 2004, 2007; Schneider et al., 2005), few studies have been conducted from the employee perspective of the relationship between customers behavior and employees emotional response (Li and Zhou, 2013). Aggressive customer behavior is stressful for employees and is associated with negative emotional consequences such as burnout (Grandey, Dickter, & Sin, 2004). Such symptoms are, in turn, likely to have adverse effects on employee work attitudes and behavior. Pearson & Porath (2004) call for more research on how mistreatment by customers may lead to negative employee behaviors directed toward them—such as employee sabotage of customers—a counterproductive work behavior whereby an employee intentionally harms the legitimate interests of a customer. Such sabotage behavior has been argued and shown to be harmful to customer relationships (e.g., Bitner, Booms, & Tetrault, 1990; Pearson & Porath, 2004). Therefore, this study explored the impact of customer verbal aggression on employee emotions and sabotage behaviors from an HR management perspective.
To date, few studies have examined the variables that prevent or buffer the effects of customer aggression. A literature review reveals three broad moderating variables: situational, organizational and personal. Situational factors include social support, fairness perceptions, etc. that is likely to influence the antecedent outcome relationship (Leather et al., 1998; Skarlicki et al., 1997). Organizational support, training, or organizational norms and procedures are the organizational factors that help prevent or discourage aggressive behavior (Kelly et al., 1996, Leather et al., 1998). Finally, personal factors include traits, characteristics and emotional intelligence of both the both the perpetrator and victim. Certain personality characteristics such as negative affectivity (Aquino et al., 2006; Skarlicki et al., 1997) and previous traumatic events (Douglas & Martinko, 2001) may heighten individual reactions to adverse events. The employee may then be predisposed to experiencing (being victimized) or displaying anger (become a perpetrator). Hu (2013) further proposed that high emotional intelligence buffers the positive influence of problem customer perceptions on emotional labor tax but negatively affects positive service behaviors.