Getting Even for Customer Mistreatment

The Role of Moral Identity in the Relationship Between Customer Interpersonal Injustice and Employee Sabotage

Skarlicki, Daniel P.
van Jaarsveld, Danielle D.
Walker, David D.

¹Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

This article is based on a presentation at the 22nd annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, held in April 2007 in New York. This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors acknowledge Karl Aquino, Laurie Barclay, and David Jones for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We thank John Buda for his assistance in this research.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel P. Skarlicki, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2. E-mail: [email protected]

Received August 18, 2007; Revision received April 5, 2008; Accepted April 14, 2008

Journal of Applied Psychology 93(6):p 1335-1347, November 2008. | DOI: 10.1037/a0012704

Research on the “dark side” of organizational behavior has determined that employee sabotage is most often a reaction by disgruntled employees to perceived mistreatment. To date, however, most studies on employee retaliation have focused on intra-organizational sources of (in)justice. Results from this field study of customer service representatives (N = 358) showed that interpersonal injustice from customers relates positively to customer-directed sabotage over and above intra-organizational sources of fairness. Moreover, the association between unjust treatment and sabotage was moderated by 2 dimensions of moral identity (symbolization and internalization) in the form of a 3-way interaction. The relationship between injustice and sabotage was more pronounced for employees high (vs. low) in symbolization, but this moderation effect was weaker among employees who were high (vs. low) in internalization. Last, employee sabotage was negatively related to job performance ratings.