The dark side of service environment: A systematic literature review and experimental examination of dysfunctional behaviors during service experiences

Service climate with ongoing functional and prosocial relationships among service actors, which are consistently and idealistically portrayed in promotional materials, has turned into an unrealistic utopia (Fisk et al., 2010). Several studies and industrial reports show that negativity in organizations, especially in organizational frontlines, is at the crisis level. In the same vein, in the last two decades, a number of studies on dark side issues has skyrocketed. As accumulated knowledge in the field has increased, unsystematic term proliferation started to cause overlapping blurred constructs that impair construct clarity in the field. It now becomes essential to uncover constructs that clearly target actual world phenomena and understand their distinctive relations with specific antecedents and consequences. Therefore, the current thesis aims (1) to provide a conceptually clear, operationally meaningful and practically important set of constructs for dark side phenomena in service ecosystems and (2) to understand and examine these constructs' associated and distinctive relations with other motivational, cognitive, emotional and behavioral constructs. In this dissertation, the author conducted three sets of studies that examine and resolve these aforementioned issues. Firstly, the author systematically reviewed studies related to dark side issues in organizational behavior and marketing literatures between 1975 and 2016. By using the results of this systematic review, the author suggests four sub-constructs (aggression, incivility, sabotage and production deviance), which can be clearly dissociated from others using two dimensions (person targeted/process targeted and ambiguity of harm). Secondly, the author employed two meta-analytic studies that investigate the person targeted dysfunctional acts between customers and frontline employees during service experiences. In the first meta-analytic review, data from prior employee-level studies on customer mistreatment is collected and potential employee-driven antecedents of customer mistreatment are investigated. Results showed that organizational and personal factors significantly influence employees' exposure to customer mistreatment. Especially, customer orientation has a strong negative relationship with exposure to customer mistreatment. In the second meta-analysis, the relationship between customer mistreatment and frontline employees' dysfunctional acts is investigated. Results provided support for the suggested typology in the systematic review and findings showed that the effect of customer mistreatment on employee incivility, employee aggression, service sabotage behaviors and product deviance varies in strengths. Results provided no significant effect of customer mistreatment on employee aggression but strong relationship between employee incivility and employee sabotage. Thirdly, author conducted two experimental studies that investigate the effects of employee and customer mistreatment on bystander customers' emotions, evaluations and judgments related to the service providers. Results showed that witnessing aggression during service experiences increase specific self-conscious emotions (shame and embarrassment) and decrease revisit intentions. Witnessing aggression among employees had stronger effect on witnessing customers' emotions than witnessing aggression among other customers. Second experimental study also showed that witnessing aggression effects embarrassment and shame but witnessing incivility only affects embarrassment but not shame. All in all, this thesis project contributes to the literature by analyzing the internal structure of harm-motivated behaviors in service context and examining its antecedents and consequences from different point-of-views by using multiple methods. It is believed that this thesis provides valid explanations for what are the main characteristics of dark side issues, how these types of behaviors are formed and resulted.