Customer mistreatment and employees’ coping strategies: A Meta-SEM analysis

Abstract

Despite the numerous studies on customer mistreatment, our understanding of the effectiveness of coping strategies for customer mistreatment remains limited. This research provides a meta-analytic structural equation modeling (meta-SEM) analysis to explore the distinctive coping types that employees may use when encountering customer mistreatment, as well as the subsequent outcomes. Drawing on the regulatory focus theory and the coping toward customer mistreatment, we categorize various coping strategies into three types (i.e., goal-oriented promotive coping, confrontation-oriented promotive coping, and preventive coping), and propose that these coping types have differential relationships with outcomes. Through a meta-SEM analysis based on 143 articles and 155 independent samples (N = 44,378), we found that these three coping types significantly mediated the mistreatment–outcomes relationships, and that goal-oriented promotive coping was a more beneficial type of coping. This research provides significant implications for employees and organizations to effectively cope with customer mistreatment.