Wise heads fend off confrontation: How age and experience can diffuse customer clash
Human Resource Management International Digest
ISSN: 0967-0734
Article publication date: 9 January 2017
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper was to examine age differences in conflict management strategy use, effectiveness and in exposure to customer stressors in service interactions.
Design/methodology/approach
Moderated regression and mediation analyses were conducted to test hypotheses in a sample of 444 German service employees from different service branches with frequent customer contact.
Findings
Results revealed that older service employees experienced fewer customer stressors. Customer stressors mediated the negative relationship between age and burnout. Age was associated with use of passive avoidant (avoiding) and active constructive (problem-solving) conflict management strategies. Furthermore, older employees used those strategies more effectively. Especially when avoiding conflicts, older employees reported more professional efficacy than younger colleagues. In contrast, younger employees benefited considerably less from strategy use and reported higher levels of burnout in general. Thus, results suggest older employees’ effective conflict management and their positive perception of customer stressors contribute to lower levels of burnout.
Originality/value
This study is one of the first to examine age-related conflict management skills with regard to customer conflicts, employee health and effectiveness of strategy use. It replicates existing findings on age and conflict management and extends them in several ways thereby ruling out alternative explanations for age effects.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Retraction notice
The Publisher wishes to retract the precis article “Wise heads fend off confrontation: How age and experience can diffuse customer clash”, published in Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 25 No. 1, 2017. It has come to the attention of Emerald Publishing that this precis article contains large sections of unattributed text taken from the original research article “Conflict management and age in service professions”, by Lena Aline Beitler, Sabine Machowski, Sheena Johnson, Dieter Zapf, published in International Journal of Conflict Management, Vol. 27 No. 3, 2016.
Precis articles are intended to summarise original academic research articles for a different audience, and should not include verbatim passages from the original articles. This error occurred due to a miscommunication in the commissioning process.
To avoid any repeated incidents of this nature, Emerald has fully revised its guidelines and briefed its Commissioning Editors. Human Resource Management International Digest sincerely apologises to the original authors and its readers for this error. The original article can be viewed here: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCMA-10-2015-0070.
Citation
(2017), "Wise heads fend off confrontation: How age and experience can diffuse customer clash", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 10-12. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-10-2016-0134
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited