Is the Customer Always Right? The Influence of Customer Aggression on Work Emotional Exhaustion of Front-Line Service Employees

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-835-6_115How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Social cognitive theory; Customer aggression; Cultural competency; Negative reciprocity beliefs; Work emotional exhaustion

Abstract

In the field of relationship marketing, the concept that “the customer is always right” is not always reasonable, especially when facing aggressive customer behavior. Based on previous research on uncivilized behaviors of customers in the workplace, this paper selects the front-line service staff in the hotel industry as the research object. Customer attacks negatively affect the emotional exhaustion of front-line service staff, which has important cognitive value and practical significance. Based on the above background, this paper sorts out and analyzes the related research on customer aggression, cultural ability, negative reciprocity concept, work emotional exhaustion, etc. It is found that the current research on customer aggression in the hotel industry is relatively limited, and the research on the boundary conditions of customer aggression within the industry is few and far between, lacking theoretical guidance and practical significance. Therefore, this study will take previous and current research as the foothold and be based on social cognitive theory to explore which boundary conditions are the main factors affecting customer attacks and the work emotional exhaustion of front-line service staff, and to study the relationship among the three. This study will use Spss and Amos to verify the data of the model and hypotheses and then put forward specific suggestions on how to alleviate the work emotional exhaustion of front-line service employees.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yi-Ran Shi
AU  - Gui-Cheng Shi
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/09/17
TI  - Is the Customer Always Right? The Influence of Customer Aggression on Work Emotional Exhaustion of Front-Line Service Employees
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 3rd International Academic Conference on Management Innovation and Economic Development (MIED 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1076
EP  - 1083
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-835-6_115
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-835-6_115
ID  - Shi2025
ER  -