A Research into the Effects of Psychological Contract Breach on Customer Incivility:From the Perspective of Self-control

Abstract

Abstract:

In recent years, customer incivility has been increasingly paid attention by domestic and foreign scholars. However, existing researches mainly focus on negative consequences of customer incivility, without enough attention to its antecedents. Drawing on ego depletion theory, we investigate how psychological contract breach induce customer incivility from employees' perspective and specifically, pay attention to the mediating role of customers' state of self-control and moderating role of relationship quality between customers and employees. By a sample of 231 customer-employee dyads, we find that employee psychological contract breach has a significant positive effect on customer incivility; state self-control mediates the association between psychological contract breach and customer incivility; relationship quality between customers and employees not only negatively moderates the association of psychological contract breach and customer incivility, but also negatively moderates the mediation mechanism of psychological contract breach-state self-control-customer incivility. This study firstly empirically examines the inducement mechanism of customer incivility from employees' perspective, enriches the existing workplace incivility researches, and provides a theoretical reference for service companies.

Key words: customer incivility, psychological contract breach, state of self-control, relationship quality

Zhan Xiaojun, Cao Yuankun, Li Zhicheng. A Research into the Effects of Psychological Contract Breach on Customer Incivility:From the Perspective of Self-control[J]. , 2017, 29(10): 132-142.

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