“Killing them with kindness”? A study of service employees' responses to uncivil customers

• Author: Kirsten Robertson,Jane O'Reilly
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2425
• Date: 01 October 2020
• Published date: 01 October 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

“Killing them with kindness”? A study of service employees'

responses to uncivil customers

Kirsten Robertson

1

| Jane O'Reilly

2

1

School of Business, University of the Fraser

Valley, Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada

2

Telfer School of Management, University of

Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Correspondence

Kirsten Robertson, School of Business,

University of the Fraser Valley, 33844 King

Road, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M7, Canada.

Email: Kirsten.robertson@ufv.ca

Funding information

Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada, Grant/Award Number: Aid

to Small Universities Grant

Summary

Experiencing uncivil customers is a frequent reality for many people working in the

service industry. Past research has established that dealing with uncivil customers

can be distressing for employees and can sometimes lead them to engage in recipro-

cal, discourteous behavior. The purpose of our research is to delve deeper into the

experience of customer incivility from the perspective of service employees in order

to better understand the various ways in which they respond to customer incivility.

We conducted 64 interviews with service employees across an array of occupations

and developed a typology of responses to customer incivility. These responses fell

into four categories based on the extent to which service employees' actions were

intended to promote social harmony (and therefore could broadly be considered civil

or uncivil), as well as their perceived agency in the situation. We describe how each

response was associated with different interpersonal and intrapersonal consequences

and explain the implications of our typology for management theory and practice.

KEYWORDS

customer service, incivility, workplace mistreatment

1|INTRODUCTION

Experiencing rude customers is an unfortunate and frequent reality

for people working in the service industry. With a quick Google sea-

rch, one is inundated by pop-press articles with tips about how to

“best”handle hostile customers and blog posts where strangers com-

miserate over stories of ill-mannered patrons. A number of survey

results speak to the prevalence of customer incivility. For example, in

a study of 198 call center agents, 60% reported being yelled at or

insulted by a customer within the past week (Grandey, Dickter, & Sin,

2004). Similarly, in a survey of service workers across a variety of

occupations, 42% reported experiencing an irate customer at least

once a week (Abiala, 1999). Not only is customer incivility a frequent

experience for service workers, but it is also a stressor that can have

significant costs for their well-being (e.g., Arnold & Walsh, 2015) and

job performance (e.g., Rafaeli et al., 2012).

Although we know that customer incivility is a frequent and detri-

mental experience, much less is known about how employees inter-

pret and manage these interactions. Investigating employees'

interpersonal responses in uncivil service encounters has not gone

completely ignored in management research. A salient narrative is that

customer incivility elicits reciprocal, uncivil responses from employees

(e.g., van Jaarsveld, Walker, & Skarlicki, 2010; Walker, van Jaarsveld,

& Skarlicki, 2014; Wang, Liao, Zhan, & Shi, 2011). This “tit-for-tat”

theory is both intuitive and empirically supported, but reciprocating

in-kind behavior towards an uncivil customer is likely only one of a

variety of approaches a service employee might use to navigate an

uncivil interaction (see also Amarnani, Bordia, & Restubog, 2018).

Indeed, research within the broader area of mistreatment has docu-

mented that not everyone responds to mistreatment in antisocial

ways (e.g., Fisk & Neville, 2011; Xu, Huang, & Robinson, 2017; Yue,

Wang, & Groth, 2017). Furthermore, research outside the context of

mistreatment has revealed that individuals employ a wide variety of

successful and unsuccessful responses to navigate the challenges they

encounter in the workplace (e.g., Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Schabram

& Maitlis, 2017).

Extending from this observation, the purpose behind our research

is to better understand the various ways in which employees respond

Received: 31 July 2018 Revised: 19 December 2019 Accepted: 20 December 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2425

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:797–813. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 797

to uncivil customers. In doing so, we are also interested in learning

more about the interpersonal and intrapersonal consequences of

these responses. We draw on in-depth interviews with 64 service

workers across a number of organizations and apply an inductive

approach to allow for the various individual strategies to emerge from

participants' own accounts of uncivil customer interactions. Our

research reveals a typology of four overarching responses service

employees engage in when responding to an uncivil customer. Each

response is distinguished by service employees' intention to maintain

social harmony (and therefore their belief that their response is

civil/uncivil), their perceived agency, and the social and emotional

consequences resulting from their response.

Our typology provides a novel guide and fruitful starting point for

expanding knowledge of how employees respond to uncivil cus-

tomers, an area of research that other scholars have noted is lacking

(see Amarnani et al., 2018). Although we find evidence that

employees can and do respond in in-kind, uncivil ways, our research

also reveals that service workers gravitate towards alternative

responses. Importantly, our research explains how customer service

employees avoid escalating an uncivil encounter with a customer,

shedding some light on the “departure points”identified in models of

incivility spirals within this context (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).

Finally, our research provides a detailed account of the intrapersonal

emotions and thoughts that employees experience as a result of their

own response towards an uncivil customer.

2|THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Drawing from broader theory on demarcations between civility and

incivility, Andersson and Pearson (1999) defined workplace incivility

as “low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the

target, in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect”(p. 457).

Incivility is often studied under the broader conceptual space of work-

place aggression (Hershcovis, 2011) and includes behavior that vio-

lates norms of respectful treatment but that is not particularly

harassing (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Within a service context,

examples include customers rolling their eyes at workers, using a con-

descending tone of voice, and speaking on their phone throughout a

service interaction. Incivility can be considered through a social inter-

actionist lens (Andersson & Pearson, 1999); it is an interaction event

between at least two parties that is influenced by the social context in

which it occurs, the meaning imbued in behaviors and communication,

and the perceptions of those involved (Brown & Levinson, 1987).

2.1 |The tit-for-tat model of escalating incivility

In their seminal work, Andersson and Pearson (1999) describe a spiral-

ing tit-for-tat pattern, where incivility can escalate to more severe

forms of interpersonal mistreatment. They describe incivility as a type

of identity threat that elicits anger and humiliation, which in turn moti-

vates reciprocal negative treatment. In the context of customer-

instigated incivility, much of the research that has focused on under-

standing employees' reactions has investigated the extent to which

uncivil customer behavior begets further incivility (e.g., Lee & Ok,

2014; Mullen & Kelloway, 2013; van Jaarsveld et al., 2010; Walker et

al., 2014).

Despite this recognition that individuals often have a desire to

respond to rude behavior in reciprocal ways, much less research

attention has been devoted to understanding other potential

responses an employee might use to navigate an uncivil encounter

(Amarnani et al., 2018), or what Andersson and Pearson (1999) refer

to as “departure points”within their tit-for-tat spiral model. The tit-

for-tat framework implicitly suggests that individuals are passive prod-

ucts of their emotions or suffer from an inability to effectively manage

their reactions. Indeed, an explicit underlying assumption of negative

interpersonal exchange spirals (see both Andersson & Pearson, 1999,

and Groth & Grandey, 2012) is that they occur because the individuals

involved either lack an adequate understanding of the consequences

of their behavior or are unwilling or unable to alter their antagonistic

reactions (Masuch, 1985). We assert that in many situations

employees can adequately make sense of an uncivil encounter with a

customer and deliberately choose a course of action that does not

contribute to a negative tit-for-tat pattern of behavior.

2.2 |Potential for different responses towards an

uncivil customer

There are several reasons to expect that service employees may avoid

engaging in reciprocal uncivil behavior as a response to customers'

incivility. First, according to the social interactionist perspective of

incivility, the social context broadly influences the dynamics of an

uncivil social interaction. One contextual variable that has received

considerable attention in mistreatment research is social power

(Callahan, 2011; Cortina, Magley, Williams, & Langhout, 2001). In the

service industry, customers typically enjoy greater social power than

employees (Hochschild, 1983). Several factors contribute to these

power dynamics. Although most service organizations have explicit

rules that oblige workers to treat customers with civility, this same

formal obligation does not typically extend from the customer back to

the worker (Ben-Zur & Yagil, 2005). Also, there is a prevalent mantra

within service-oriented businesses that “the customer is always right,”

which symbolically places customers in a superior position by implying

that customers can “do no wrong”(Grandey et al., 2004). Workers are

also at high risk of being disciplined for responding acrimoniously

towards uncivil customers, whereas there is little formal authority

monitoring or punishing customers' behavior (Groth & Grandey,

2012).

Fundamental theory on power in social interactions suggests that

low-powered individuals pay more attention to the actions of their

high-powered interaction partners and are more likely to consciously

control their behavior, than vice versa (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Ander-

son, 2003). This research would suggest that service employees faced

with uncivil customers will consider the dynamics of the situation,

798 ROBERTSON AND O'REILLY