Customers acting badly: Evidence from the hospitality industry☆

a r t i c l e i n f o The activities of misbehaving customers represent a significant problem for organizations across diverse sectors and industries. Customer misbehavior signifies behavior within the exchange setting that deliberately violates the generally accepted norms of conduct in such situations. The core aim of this study is to advance understanding of the antecedents to past customer misbehavior and examine the relationship between past misbehavior and future misbehavior intentions. Although prior studies offer insights into individual events or types of customer misbehavior, to date, empirical evidence of the antecedents to past misbehaviors and future behavioral intentions is lacking. Synthesizing literature from varied theoretical backgrounds, this study puts forth five personality-based variables (consumer alienation, Machiavellianism, sensation seeking, aggressiveness , and self-esteem) and four demographic variables (gender, income, age, and education) as antecedents to past customer misbehavior. In turn, this study reveals an association between past customer misbehavior and future misbehavior intent. Structural equation modeling procedures using a sample of 380 respondents reveals support for eight of the nine specified hypotheses. The article concludes with a discussion of the study's implications for theory and practice. Consumers' deliberate acts of misbehavior are daily predicaments for firms across disparate sectors and industries (Fisk et al., 2010; Fullerton and Punj, 2004). As a result, the long-standing cliché that the " customer is always right " is outdated, unrealistic, and naive (Reynolds and Harris, 2006). Given that the dysfunctional activities of customers represent a considerable financial, psychological, and physical cost to organizations, their personnel, and patrons (Harris and Reynolds, 2003), an understanding of the antecedents that drive such behaviors is imperative. The number of calls for empirical research on the broader study of the drivers of customer dysfunction mirrors this However, empirical investigations of the antecedents of customer misbehavior are rare. Typically, such studies focus on examining antecedents to individual forms of misbehavior (see Grégoire et al., 2009; Harris, 2008) or focus on the severity of a specific episode of customer deviance (see Reynolds and Harris, 2009). Similarly, although past actions are good predictors of future behavior (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990), existing research neglects the association between previous acts of customer deviance and future customer misbehavior Although such studies provide insights into individual events or particular types of customer misbehavior, to date, self-report empirical evidence of the antecedents to past misbehaviors is limited, and research into the link between past …