Customer verbal aggression and employee service sabotage: The mediating role of perceived discrimination

The five-star hotel context highlights the differences in social identity between employees and guests as a factor that impacts how employees handle customer verbal aggression. Considering this point, the present study em-ploys the social cognitive theory of social class to propose a social-class-based customer-employee interaction model to explain the relationship between customer verbal aggression and employee service sabotage. We examine whether the Eastern cultural tradition mitigates this effect by instilling different perceptions of tradi-tional hierarchical systems. A two-level (employees, supervisors) data collection/analysis model is applied to treat data from 309 employee-supervisor dyads from nine five-star hotels in China. The results indicate that frontline service employees' perceived discrimination mediates the effect of customer verbal aggression on service sabotage. Thus, the Eastern cultural tradition, directly and indirectly, acts as a boundary condition for these effects. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.