Mitigating immediate and lagged effects of customer mistreatment on service failure and sabotage: Critical roles of service recovery behaviors

Drawing on the justice-and resource-based perspectives, we designed two complementary studies to predict the detrimental effects of customer mistreatment on service failure and sabotage and to prescribe solutions (i.e., service recovery behaviors) to mitigate these effects. In Study 1, we employed a room reservation simulation to demonstrate the causal effects of customer mistreatment on hotel interns' immediate and subsequent service failures/sabotage. In Study 2, the experience sampling method was used to collect 232 employee-customer paired encounter data from 70 hotel/restaurant frontline employees. The results of the two studies indicate that customer mistreatment produces positive immediate and lagged effects on customer-rated service failure and service sabotage. Importantly, the positive immediate and lagged effects of customer mistreatment on customer-rated service failure and service sabotage are mitigated when frontline employees employ a courteous and prompt problem-handling strategy.