Predicting frontline employees' emotional labor after suffering customer incivility: A job passion perspective

The phenomenon of customer incivility poses significant challenges for frontline employees whose expression of emotion determines the service experience. Few studies have explored the mediating mechanisms linking customer incivility to frontline employees' emotional labor. Drawing on the dualistic model of job passion theory, we proposed job passion as a feasible mediator of the links from customer incivility to frontline employees' emotional labor. Using data from 1040 frontline employees across the retailing, banking, and hospitality sectors, the results indicate that job passion acts as the psychological mechanism underlying the relationships between customer incivility and frontline employees' emotional labor. Specifically, customer incivility is positively associated with frontline employees' surface acting through both obsessive passion and harmonious passion. Conversely, customer incivility is negatively linked with deep acting only through harmonious passion. Our findings clarify the psychological mechanisms through which customer incivility affects frontline employees' emotional labor from the perspective of job passion. Furthermore, the current study also extends the job passion model to the boundary-spanning context to explain how frontline employees respond to customer incivility. This study sheds light on how service practitioners can support frontline employees in dealing with customer incivility.