The effect of customer incivility on proactive customer service performance mediated by emotional exhaustion and moderated by proactive personality.

The existing body of research offers limited insight into the detrimental effects of incivility phenomena on proactive customer service performance (PCSP) from the customer's perspective. Drawing on the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) framework and conservation of resources (COR) theory, this paper examines how customer incivility is associated with PCSP, with a particular focus on emotional exhaustion as a mediator and proactive personality as a moderator. Utilizing survey methodology, customer-contact employees in China were sampled with a time lag of three weeks in three waves. SPSS 27.0, the PROCESS macro (Model 59) and AMOS 27.0 were utilized to analyze the data. The results showed that customer incivility had a positive impact on emotional exhaustion and reduced PCSP. Additionally, the indirect effect of customer incivility on PCSP through emotional exhaustion was significant, indicating a significant mediating effect. The results also revealed that proactive personality significantly moderated the association between customer incivility and emotional exhaustion and the moderated mediation index was also significant. These findings indicate that proactive personality serves as a positive psychological resource, enhancing employees' capacity to mitigate the adverse effects of customer incivility (stressor) and emotional exhaustion (strain) while enabling them to consistently engage in proactive service behaviors (outcome), thereby breaking the vicious path of the SSO framework.