Their bad experiences make me think twice: Customer-to-colleague incivility, self-reflection, and improved service delivery

Abstract

Prior research has shown that customer incivility impacts targeted employees' performance. Yet, whether such experiences also influence bystander employees has been overlooked. In this work, we take a third-party perspective and suggest that observed customer-to-colleague incivility may have a positive impact on bystander employees' service performance. Drawing on social learning theory, we develop a model where we study the consequence of observed customer-to-colleague incivility on service performance through self-reflection. A two-week experience sampling study with data collected from 99 nurses revealed that, observed daily customer-to-colleague incivility was positively related to bystander employees' daily self-reflection, which in turn was positively associated with their daily service performance. Moreover, we identified performance-based self-esteem (i.e., the importance of performance to self-esteem) as a key boundary condition that explains for whom witnessing customer-to-colleague incivility is more likely to engender higher self-reflection. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.