Customer Incivility, Work Engagement and Service-Oriented Citizenship Behaviours: Does Servant Leadership Make a Difference?

The focus of this study is on how and why incivility is related to employee outcomes. Drawing on role theory, the study tests a moderated mediation model in which customer incivility is indirectly related to service-oriented citizenship behaviours via work engagement, and this mediated relationship is moderated by servant leadership. Time-lagged, multisource data from a sample of nurses and their direct supervisors in thirty public hospitals in Romania were used to test the proposed model. The results of generalized multilevel structural equation modeling (GSEM) showed that the relationship between customer incivility and service citizenship behaviours was mediated by work engagement. Furthermore, this indirect relationship was weaker when employees work under a servant leader. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.