Customer Mistreatment Harms Nightly Sleep and Next-Morning Recovery: Job Control and Recovery Self-Efficacy as Cross-Level Moderators

Customer mistreatment is becoming an important topic for work stress researchers and practitioners given the rise of service industry. Taking stressor- emotion- control perspectives, the authors examine day-level relationships between call center workers' customer mistreatment experiences and their impaired recovery outcomes mediated by end-of-work negative affect. Furthermore, control concepts in the job and personal domains are tested as cross-level moderators. Specifically, job control and recovery self-efficacy are identified to reduce the within-person process of customer mistreatment affecting recovery outcomes. Seventy-one call center employees completed a registration survey and then two daily surveys over 2 consecutive weeks, yielding 481 time-lagged day-level observations. Multilevel path analyses show that customer mistreatment is positively associated with increased negative affect, which, in turn, predicts poor sleep quality at night and poor recovery state the next morning. Job control attenuates the day-level effect of customer mistreatment on negative affect, and recovery self-efficacy alleviates the day-level effects of negative affect on sleep quality and next-morning recovery state. The findings shed light on the recovery-impairing effects of customer mistreatment and its important boundary conditions.