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The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating role customer orientation plays in the relationship between service employees’ personality and their perceived experiences of customer incivility.

Service workers from a variety of industries were recruited from an online panel service and asked to complete a self-report on-line questionnaire (n = 253). PLS structural equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.

Service employees who are high in agreeableness and core self-evaluations are more customer-oriented and, as a result, report fewer customer incivility experiences. Disagreeable and neurotic service employees are more likely to be selling-orientated, but this was unrelated to customer incivility.

The results are limited because all data are self-report. However, the findings suggest that personality and customer orientation influence employees’ customer incivility experiences.

Service jobs can be stressful, in part, because employees have to deal with rude and abusive customers. However, little is known about the antecedents to customer incivility from the perspective of the service provider. The present study bridges this gap and provides an understanding of the mechanisms by which targeted employees’ personality characteristics and customer-oriented behaviors influence their experiences of customer incivility. The results suggest two possible pathways to reduce employees’ customer incivility experiences including selection and training activities to develop a high core self-evaluation and more customer-oriented behaviors.

Work design has largely overlooked cognitive–emotional interactions in understanding employee motivation and satisfaction. My aim in this chapter is to develop a conceptual model that integrates what we know about these interactions from research on emotions and neuroscience with traditional and emergent work design perspectives. I propose that striving for universal goals influences how a person responds to the work characteristics, such that an event that is personally relevant or “self-referential” will elicit an emotional reaction that must be regulated for optimal performance, job satisfaction, and well-being. A Self-Referential Emotion Regulatory Model (SERM) of work design is presented.

Scholars and practitioners in the OB literature nowadays appreciate that emotions and emotional regulation constitute an inseparable part of work life, but the HRM literature has lagged in addressing the emotional dimensions of life at work. In this chapter therefore, beginning with a multi-level perspective taken from the OB literature, we introduce the roles played by emotions and emotional regulation in the workplace and discuss their implications for HRM. We do so by considering five levels of analysis: (1) within-person temporal variations, (2) between persons (individual differences), (3) interpersonal processes; (4) groups and teams, and (5) the organization as a whole. We focus especially on processes of emotional regulation in both self and others, including discussion of emotional labor and emotional intelligence. In the opening sections of the chapter, we discuss the nature of emotions and emotional regulation from an OB perspective by introducing the five-level model, and explaining in particular how emotions and emotional regulation play a role at each of the levels. We then apply these ideas to four major domains of concern to HR managers: (1) recruitment, selection, and socialization; (2) performance management; (3) training and development; and (4) compensation and benefits. In concluding, we stress the interconnectedness of emotions and emotional regulation across the five levels of the model, arguing that emotions and emotional regulation at each level can influence effects at other levels, ultimately culminating in the organization’s affective climate.