부산대학교 도서관

The service industry is dominated by the notions of customer sovereignty, such as “The customer is always right”, “The customer is king” and “Service with a smile.” These notions create unequal power relationships between customer service representatives (CSRs) and customers, where by CSRs are easily exposed to customer-instigated aggression. However, little is known about how customer mistreatment influences CSRs in the context of hotel customer employee relationship. This study investigated the effect of customer verbal abuse on customer orientation through emotional labor and emotional exhaustion. Data were collected from 230 frontline employees of five-star hotels in Busan. Statistics SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 20.0 were used for the analysis.The results are summarized as follows. 1) Customer language violence increased surface acting in the hotel employees' emotional labor. 2) customer verbal abuse did not affect the emotional exhaustion of hotel employees. 3) surface acting of emotional labor increased emotional exhaustion while deep action reduced emotional exhaustion. 4) emotional exhaustion had negative impace on customer orientation. Finally, findings, implications are discussed in detail and limitations and future research directions of the study are suggested.