Finding the silver lining: emotion regulation perspective on customer mistreatment and employee performance

Customer mistreatment is a common occurrence in service contexts, which has been found to have detrimental effects on employee performance. Different from the dominant view on the negative performance outcomes resulting from customer mistreatment, our study draws on emotion regulation theory to investigate how and when customer mistreatment can positively affect employee performance. We identify cognitive reappraisal as a key mechanism linking customer mistreatment to task performance, customer-focused voice and customer-directed deviant behavior, and we argue that engaging in cognitive reappraisal is contingent on agreeableness. Using latent moderated structural equation modeling to analyze two-wave, multi-source data from 169 call center workers in China, we found that there exists a conditional indirect relationship between customer mistreatment and customer-focused voice as well as customer-directed deviant behavior via increased cognitive reappraisal for employees with high agreeableness. These results help to extend the line of literature on customer mistreatment and provide suggestions for management practices on how to cope with customer mistreatment effectively.