Negative role modeling in hospitality organizations: A social learning perspective on supervisor and subordinate customer-targeted incivility

The present study extends research on workplace incivility by investigating how and when supervisor customer-targeted incivility stimulates that of employees via a social learning mechanism. This study examines a dual-stage moderated mediation model using hotel samples of 409 frontline service employees from 62 service teams. The results demonstrate that employees learn (i.e., observe and imitate) from their supervisor’s customer-targeted uncivil behavior and subsequently engage in this behavior themselves. Employee devaluation of customers plays a mediating role in this social learning process. In addition, this study identifies leader-member exchange (LMX) and perceived service climate as boundary conditions of the observation and imitation processes, respectively. Specifically, employees are more likely to devalue customers when they have a higher LMX with supervisors and show more incivility to customers when perceiving a weaker service climate. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are addressed.