›› 2019, Vol. 31 ›› Issue (8): 169-180.

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A New Perspective on the Relationship between Psychological Contract and Customer Incivility: Two-way Perspective of Employee Responsibility and Customer Responsibility

Liu Ruping1, Fan Guangwei2, Zhao Xin3, Ma Qinhai1   

  1. 1. School of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819;
    2. School of Business Administration, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang 110016;
    3. School of Business Administration, Shenyang University, Shenyang 110044
  • Received:2018-08-16 Online:2019-08-28 Published:2019-09-11

Abstract:

The existing studies on antecedents of customer incivility only focus on the violation of employees' responsibility on customer incivility, but it remains unknown about what is the impact of customers' own responsibility on customer incivility and whether the influence mechanism is different between the impact of employees' responsibility and customers' own responsibility on incivility. Based on Social Exchange Theory, this paper explores the relationship between psychological contract and customer incivility from the two-way perspectives of customer perceived employee responsibility and customers' own responsibility, and examines the mediating role of customer satisfaction and the moderating role of customer public self-consciousness. A survey is conducted to collect data through questionnaire star network platform. The results show that employee responsibility and customer responsibility have a significant negative impact on customer incivility; the mediating effect of satisfaction is significant, and the public self-consciousness plays a negative moderating role between satisfaction and customer incivility. Employee responsibility has a stronger impact on satisfaction than customer responsibility. There is no significant difference in the negative impact of customer responsibility and employee responsibility on customer incivility.

Key words: customer incivility, customer psychological contract, frontline employee, satisfaction, public self-consciousness