Examination of the antecedents and outcomes of customer incivility: A case study of the Vietnamese hospitality industry

Abstract

Frontline employees are taken consideration as a vital part in most of organizations expressing service quality with the aim of upgrading customer retention via attracting their loyalty. Nonetheless, during confronting clients, FLEs frequently face to customer incivility, which can lead them to negative responses resulting in low customers’ faith and trust to the enterprise service. Thus, this study will investigate factors posing client uncivil attitudes as well as its outcomes in order to minimize or eliminate this phenomenon. There are several alarming statistics in hospitality industries that almost of service staffs experience incivility at work; whereas, more than half confirmed this status occurs at least once a week, which poses FLEs to display negative outcomes, e.g. job-related stress, poor service performance as well as renders a potential burden while they are trying to please customers and meet their need. A collection was gathered from a sample of 477 customers facing employees working in hospitality organizations (hotel and restaurant) in Ho Chi Minh City, the biggest city of Vietnam, data were analyzed through structural equation modeling, and T-test. The results of this study suggest that male, low education level, and younger employees (Generation Z) scored higher on Customer Incivility than female, upper education level, and older staffs (before Generation Z). The current research investigates the antecedents and the outcomes of customer incivility for a case study in Vietnamese hospitality industry. Previous researchers have highlighted the need for more research exam efforts in examining the antecedents of customer incivility or the outcomes of customer incivility. The current research investigates the antecedents and the outcomes of customer incivility in Vietnamese hospitality industry.