Customer mistreatment and employee customer-focused voice: the bright and dark sides of felt trust

Purpose This study aims to assess a moderated-mediation model to account for the relationship between customer mistreatment and frontline hotel employees’ customer-focused voice, where their organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) served as a mediator and their felt trust (reliance and disclosure) by supervisors served as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected through paper-based questionnaires in a cross-sectional survey, consisting of 319 valid supervisor-employee-paired responses from 33 international tourist hotels in Taiwan. Regression analyses were used for hypothesis testing. Findings OBSE mediates the negative effect of customer mistreatment on customer-focused voice. Employee felt reliance intensifies the negative impact of customer mistreatment on OBSE, and this interaction effect, in turn, reduces customer-focused voice through OBSE. The employee felt disclosure marginally significantly buffers the effect of customer mistreatment on OBSE. Practical implications Given the adverse effect of customer mistreatment on customer-focused voice through OBSE, hotels should strengthen employees’ service mindset and value their suggestions. The double-edged effects of felt trust suggest that managers should form a trusting relationship with their subordinates and reassure them that isolated incidents of customer mistreatment will not jeopardize their reputation. Originality/value This study integrated sociometer and self-consistency theories to examine OBSE as a psychological mechanism to explain the mistreatment-voice process. Besides assessing felt trust’s two-dimensional effects, this research is possibly the first attempt to examine felt trust as an enabling force or a threat to OBSE in the context of customer mistreatment.