Incivility Among Employees as the Driver of Customer Unethical Behavior and Customer Citizenship Behavior: The Role of Customers’ Perceived Ethicality: An Abstract

In the workplace, employees encounter incivility on a regular basis (Pearson and Porath 2005). The prevalence of incivility among employees increases the chance of customers witnessing employee-to-employee incivility during frontline encounters (Porath et al. 2010). Such incivility can lead customers to appraise the situation as unpleasant and blameworthy, resulting in their desire to seek revenge against the employees’ organization (Porath et al. 2011). Because incivility violates the generally accepted moral norm that every person ought to be treated with respect, we contend that one important, yet overlooked, question is whether witnessing employee-to-employee incivility encounter can influence customers’ perceived ethicality of an organization and their subsequent behaviors (e.g., unethical behavior targeting the organization). To answer this question, we draw upon the Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm (Mehrabian and Russell 1974) and the person-situation interactionist model (Trevino 1986) to propose a theoretical model. The results of our experimental study provide general support for the hypothesized model such that witnessing incivility among employees exerts a negative effect on customers’ perceived ethicality of these employees’ organization while this effect is amplified when customers perceive the organization as competent prior to being exposed to employee incivility. As customer perceived ethicality decreases, witnessing customers are likely to respond negatively by engaging in customer unethical behavior and reducing customer citizenship behavior. This research offers meaningful theoretical contributions and practice implications for managing frontline encounters that involve employee-to-employee incivility.