Customer incivility as an identity threat for frontline employees: The mitigating role of organizational rewards

This work proposes identity theory as a novel theoretical lens for understanding frontline employees' responses to customer incivility in tourism and hospitality. We advance pertinent research by demonstrating that constitutes dual threat (individual/collective threat) employees. Two experimental studies reveal that: towards individual affects their psychological more adversely than citizenship behavior; non-monetary rewards are effective at reducing the adverse effects of on (than monetary rewards); finally, allowing employees choose reward they deem most appropriate enhances both behavior. Based these results four-step process is proposed help managers dealing with incivility.