How customer mistreatment hinders employee sleep quality and next-morning vigor: The effects of affective rumination and mindfulness

Abstract

Customer mistreatment as a common workplace stressor in the service industry has detrimental effects on service employees. Drawing on cognitive theories of rumination, the current study examined the effect of daily customer mistreatment experience on employee recovery outcomes (sleep quality and next-morning vigor) through affective rumination. Further, we investigated the moderating role of trait mindfulness on the relationship between customer mistreatment and employee affective rumination. With 390 matched time-lagged daily observations collected from 107 fulltime in-patient nurses across five working days, our multilevel analyses revealed that daily customer mistreatment experience at work was negatively related to employee sleep quality on the same night and vigor in the next morning via affective rumination and that employee's affective rumination at the end of work and sleep quality at night sequentially mediated the relationship between daily experience of customer mistreatment and morning vigor. Besides, trait mindfulness buffered the relationship between daily customer mistreatment and affective rumination. These findings shed light on the understanding of the mechanisms between customer mistreatment and employee recovery states and potentially malleable individual characteristics that might mitigate the negative effects of customer mistreatment.