Customer-Directed Sabotage and Its Relationships with Employee Motives and Sense of Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Customer-directed sabotage refers to employees’ counterproductive work behavior that negatively affects service and harms customers’ legitimate interests (Wang et al., 2011). While it can manifest in many different behaviors, such as a flight attendant yelling at a passenger “Shut up! I’m not your servant” (Land, 2022) and a call center agent intentionally putting a customer on hold for a long period of time (Skarlicki et al., 2008), customer-directed sabotage has been conceptualized and studied as one broad concept. We consider a subtle-obvious dimension in the conceptualization and measurement of customer-directed sabotage. We contend that doing so enables a more precise examination of customer-directed sabotage and its relationship with employee motives and outcomes. Using a sample of 300 service employees, we conducted a critical incident technique-based survey to gather customer-directed sabotage events and uncover service employee motives for and outcome of customer-directed sabotage. We explored the relationship between employee motives (i.e., employee boredom, customer mistreatment) and customer-directed sabotage as well as the relationship between customer-directed sabotage and employee outcome (i.e., sense of power). Also, given the power dynamic inherent in employee–customer relationship, we examined employee chronic powerlessness as a potential moderator to the relationship between customer-directed sabotage and sense of power. We discuss implications of our findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".