The Role of Job Demands and Emotional Exhaustion in the Relationship Between Customer and Employee Incivility

Abstract

Workplace incivility research has focused on within-organizational sources of incivility, and less attention has been paid to outside-organizational sources such as customers. In a cross-sectional field study, the authors found that service employees (N = 307) who reported higher levels of uncivil treatment from customers engaged in higher levels of incivility toward customers. Specifically, the results show that customer incivility toward employees is related to employee incivility toward customers through job demands first and then emotional exhaustion. The authors discuss the implications of these results and highlight directions for future research.