Misbehaving customers: Understanding and managing customer injustice in service organizations

Customers who treat frontline service employees unfairly ar an expensive problem for companies. We know that other forms of mistreatment such as workplace incivility are costly for organizations, as Pearson and Porath show, and that in service workplaces customers can be viewed as a more common source of negative behaviors directed at employees compared with co-workers and supervisors. Frontline service employees can view customers as treating them unfairly if customers, for example, yell at them, or doubt their credibility. Understanding how customers can influence employee attitudes and behaviors is attracting increasing attention from managers and scholars. These encounters are especially problematic for managers, given the psychological and emotional toll unfair encounters have on the frontline workforce, increasing employee burnout, turnover intentions, and reducing performance. Clearly, misbehaving customers create a dilemma for managers who want the customer revenue, but, at the same time, jeopardize service quality by exposing employees to unfair treatment from customers.