Age as double‐edged sword among victims of customer mistreatment: A self‐esteem threat perspective

• Author: Prashant Bordia,Simon Lloyd D. Restubog,Ayeesha A. Abbasi,Rajiv K. Amarnani
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21949
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Date: 01 May 2019

HR SCIENCE FORUM

Age as double-edged sword among victims of customer

mistreatment: A self-esteem threat perspective

Rajiv K. Amarnani

1,2

| Simon Lloyd D. Restubog

3,4

| Prashant Bordia

5

| Ayeesha A. Abbasi

5

1

Centre for Sustainable HRM & Well-Being,

Peter Faber Business School, Australian

Catholic University, Melboune, VIC, Australia

2

Management and Organizations Department,

UWA Business School, The University of

Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

3

School of Labor and Employment Relations

and Department of Psychology, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL

4

UQ Business School at the University of

Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

5

Research School of Management, The

Australian National University, Canberra, ACT,

Australia

Correspondence

Rajiv K. Amarnani, Management and

Organizations Department, UWA Business

School, UWA Business School, The University

of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia.

Email: rajiv.amarnani@uwa.edu.au

Funding information

Prime Minister's Australia Asia Scholarship

Service workers are expected to maintain high-quality service delivery despite customer

mistreatment—the poor-quality treatment of service workers by customers—which can be

demeaning and threatening to self-esteem. Although service work is increasingly delivered by

middle-aged and older workers, very little is known about how employees across the age range

navigate abuse from customers on the job. Does advancing age help or hinder service perfor-

mance in reaction to customer mistreatment? Drawing on strength and vulnerability integration

theory, we proposed that age paradoxically both helps and hinders performance after customer

mistreatment, albeit at different stages. We tested our proposed model in a two-sample field

investigation of service workers and their supervisors using a time-lagged, dyadic design. Results

showed that age heightens the experience of self-esteem threat but, nevertheless, dampens

reactions to self-esteem threat, leading to divergent effects on performance at different stages.

Implications for age and service work, as well as aging and the sense of self, are discussed.

KEYWORDS

aging, customer mistreatment, interpersonal mistreatment, self-esteem threat, service

management, workplace aggression

1|INTRODUCTION

Service work is typically seen as a young person's job. Across a broad

range of industries, service occupations have the youngest employees

(Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). However, middle-aged and older

people are increasingly engaging in service work. Indeed, although the

median food service worker is 26.6 years old, over a quarter of food

service workers are over 35 years old (Bureau of Labor Statistics,

2017). The service industry is a leading recruiter of older workers

(Dixon, 2009), which contributes to a rising age diversity in service

work (White & Smeaton, 2016). Despite this recent trend, we know

little about the role of age in how employees navigate the challenges

of service work. Perhaps the most significant and pervasive of these

challenges is customer mistreatment: customers' poor-quality inter-

personal treatment of service workers (van Jaarsveld, Restubog,

Walker, & Amarnani, 2015). Employees are generally expected to

maintain a high quality of service despite dealing with difficult cus-

tomers (Anderson-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 2000), yet there is evi-

dence that customer mistreatment does hamper service performance

(Sliter, Sliter, & Jex, 2012; van Jaarsveld, Walker, & Skarlicki, 2010;

Walker, van Jaarsveld, & Skarlicki, 2017). Scholars suggest that service

workers experience customer mistreatment as a blow to the ego or a

threat to their self-esteem, which impacts service delivery

(Dormann & Zapf, 2004; Shao & Skarlicki, 2014). The role of the self is

especially salient in service work because it is often regarded as low-

status, stigmatized work (Shantz & Booth, 2014). Older service

workers—like their younger counterparts—may be exposed to cus-

tomer mistreatment, which could impact their service delivery.

Nevertheless, scant research to date has demonstrated the role

played by age in how people deal with interpersonal mistreatment.

Does age equip service workers with greater capacity to remain pro-

fessional and deliver high-quality service despite being subjected to

continual customer mistreatment? The aging literature points to con-

tradictory answers. Some accounts portray people as increasingly vul-

nerable, weak, and inflexible with age (Almeida, 2005); on the other

hand, some accounts show that people do also accrue socioemotional

and cognitive strengths as they grow older (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, &

Charles, 1999). Rather than positioning these claims as competing

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21949

Hum Resour Manage. 2019;58:285–299. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 285