Are you too happy to serve others? When and why positive affect makes customer mistreatment experience feel worse

Abstract

Service employees encounter frequent mistreatments on the job, and these mistreatments can occur unexpectedly. Despite the overall favorable impact of positive affect on coping with negative events, we argue that it could create an expectancy disconfirmation for service employees when they face customer mistreatment. Drawing from expectancy disconfirmation theory, we predict that such expectancy disconfirmation heightens service employees’ need for self-regulation and thus consumes self-control resources. Using a total of 791 service professionals in both online and field (i.e., e-commerce firms in China and a hotel in India) experiments, we found that positive expectancy disconfirmation was positively related to self-control depletion, which led to greater subsequent perceived mistreatment by customers and need for psychological detachment from work (Study 1 and 2). Furthermore, we identified expectation of customer mistreatment as a boundary condition that attenuated the relationship between expectancy disconfirmation and self-control depletion (Study 3 and 4). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work.