“I’m holding on thanks to my customers!” When the customer becomes the main source of social support for frontline employees

Abstract

• Objectives / Research Questions The jobs of frontline employees can occasionally be particularly demanding. Service companies have drawn up and put into practice a series of initiatives to provide social support to their frontline employees. The main sources of social support studied in the literature concern the organisation, managers, and colleagues. The objective of this research is to propose a conceptual framework of social support for frontline employees that includes customers as an additional dimension, and to study its influence on the emotional exhaustion of frontline employees.