Does customer mistreatment hinder employees from going the extra mile? The mixed blessing of being conscientious

This article aims to simultaneously examine frontline hospitality employees’ functional and dysfunctional coping mechanisms for customer mistreatment, which are meaningfully manifested in their organizational citizenship behavior toward organizations (OCBO) and toward individual coworkers (OCBI). Utilizing the multisource and multistage survey data collected from 11 hotels in Southern China, this study reveals that customer mistreatment heightens the emotional exhaustion of frontline hospitality employees, which, in turn, drives them to engage in less OCBO and, conversely, more OCBI. Furthermore, trait conscientiousness was found to accentuate both the negative linkage between customer mistreatment and OCBO and the positive linkage between customer mistreatment and OCBI, thereby suggesting that being conscientious can be a mixed blessing for exhausted individuals.