Can corporate social responsibility reduce customer mistreatment? A contingent dual-process model

Abstract

Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been widely studied, little is known about whether it has implications for customer mistreatment. In this study, we aim to understand how and when CSR is related to customer incivility, a typical type of mistreatment in service contexts. Integrating the perspectives of social exchange theory and social identity theory, we theorize that CSR influences customer incivility via customer trust and customer identification, which are contingent on front-line employees' emotional labor (i.e., surface acting and deep acting) during service interactions. In our two-source field study involving 332 employee–customer dyads, CSR promoted both customer trust and customer identification, which in turn reduced customer incivility. Moreover, the indirect relationship between CSR and customer incivility via customer trust (but not customer identification) was weakened by employee surface acting but strengthened by employee deep acting. Taken together, this study uncovers the relationship between CSR and customer mistreatment by exploring how and when CSR influences customer incivility, which advances the understanding of the customer-related implications of CSR.