Investigating employees’ emotional and cognitive reactions to customer mistreatment: an experimental study

ABSTRACT

With increasing market competitiveness, companies strive to deliver high-quality services. Negative reactions from employees to customer mistreatment erodes the quality of the service provided. This study investigated whether negative emotions and cognitive impairment are mechanisms through which customer mistreatment is related to generalized customer-directed incivility. 157 Italian (Study 1) and 259 Irish (Study 2) research participants completed questionnaires which included an experimental task that manipulated customer misbehaviour levels through scenarios to create three conditions (control, incivility, verbal aggression). Emotional reactions, cognitive impairment and generalized customer-directed incivility intentions as a result of the scenarios were investigated. In both studies, participants in the mistreatment conditions reported more negative emotions, greater cognitive impairment and higher generalized customer-directed incivility intentions than those in the control condition. In Italy (Study 1) negative emotions mediated the relationship between exposure to a customer mistreatment event and generalized customer-directed incivility intentions, but not in Ireland (Study 2), demonstrating the importance of considering contextual conditions in understanding such mediating mechanisms. This study extends research by showing how a single encounter with a misbehaving customer can contribute to the development of incivility intentions towards customers as entities. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.     

Control of voice gender in pre‐pubertal children

Adult listeners are capable of identifying the gender of speakers as young as 4 years old from their voice. In the absence of a clear anatomical dimorphism in the dimensions of pre‐pubertal boys' and girls' vocal apparatus, the observed gender differences may reflect children's regulation of their vocal behaviour. A detailed acoustic analysis was conducted of the utterances of 34 6‐ to 9‐year‐old children, in their normal voices and also when asked explicitly to speak like a boy or a girl. Results showed statistically significant shifts in fundamental and formant frequency values towards those expected from the sex dimorphism in adult voices. Directions for future research on the role of vocal behaviours in pre‐pubertal children's expression of gender are considered.