Mo Wang, University of Florida, College of Business

In this study, a social mindfulness lens is applied to understanding the phenomenon of perceived customer mistreatment. Recognizing that prosocial acts and perspective taking capture the motivation and cognition that are needed to be mindful in social interactions, we investigated whether two types of interventions (i.e., recall of prosocial action and perspective taking) affect customer service employees’ experience of customer mistreatment. Additionally, we investigated whether these two interventions might buffer the relation of employees’ daily customer mistreatment experience and their afternoon negative mood. Finally, we examined whether the interventions, via their effects on daily customer mistreatment experience and afternoon negative mood, could reduce evening dysfunctional coping responses (i.e., employee rumination and maladaptive shopping). We conducted a within-person field experiment utilizing a daily experience sampling approach with 94 customer service employees who we surveyed for 15 consecutive workdays. Consistent with expectations, both interventions significantly reduced the daily customer mistreatment experience compared to a control condition. Recall of prosocial action also significantly buffered the positive relation of daily customer mistreatment experience with afternoon negative mood. Both interventions also had significant indirect effects on evening dysfunctional coping responses.