Bad customers and bad bosses: The effect of double stressors on customer service

By J. N. Halm

Do fish know they are wet? Do Ghanaian workers know they are stressed? I do not think so, in both cases. Take the typical day in the life of the average Ghanaian, and you will understand where I am coming from. From battling traffic to get to one’s place of work to the fights one has in getting even the bare necessities of life, the life of the Ghanaian is so stressful that we have grown used to it, just like fish and water.

Stress—the silent killer of the modern workplace—creeps into our lives, affecting our health, our relationships, and our performance at work. For frontline service employees, stress comes with the territory. Dealing with customers day in and day out, especially the difficult ones, is inherently stressful. However, what happens when the stress from dealing with rude customers is compounded by stress from within the organisation itself?

This is not a hypothetical question. It is the reality for countless service employees who find themselves caught between uncivil customers on one side and conflictual relationships with their supervisors on the other. Recent research has shed light on just how damaging this double burden of stress can be.

The Grey Area of Customer Incivility

Customer incivility has become an all-too-common feature of the service landscape. It describes situations where customers engage in low-intensity deviant behaviour that violates workplace norms of mutual respect. These are not cases of outright violence or extreme aggression. Rather, they are the everyday slights, the condescending tones, the unreasonable demands, the dismissive gestures, and the subtle disrespect that frontline employees endure regularly.

The challenge with customer incivility is that it operates in a grey area. Unlike physical assault or verbal abuse, incivility is harder to pin down, harder to report, and harder to address. An employee who complains about a customer speaking to them condescendingly might be told she is being too sensitive. One who objects to unreasonable demands might be reminded that the customer is always right. Yet, the cumulative effect of these incidents takes a serious toll.

What the Research Reveals

A study published in the 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Theory and Practice examined the

effects of customer incivility on emotional labour through a two-wave survey of 222 flight attendants working for a South Korean airline. The research was titled “Customer Incivility and Emotional Labour from the Perspective of the Transactional Model of Stress: Mediation of Customer Orientation and Moderation of Interpersonal Conflict.”

The choice of flight attendants was particularly apt. These professionals work in an environment where customer incivility is not just possible but probable. Confined in an aircraft at 35,000 feet, flight attendants cannot simply walk away from difficult passengers. They must maintain composure, professionalism, and a pleasant demeanour regardless of how they are treated.

The study focused on deep acting—a strategy where employees attempt to actually feel the emotions they are required to display. Rather than simply plastering on a fake smile while seething inside, employees, engaging in deep acting, work to genuinely experience positive emotions. This form of emotional labour is considered healthier for employees because it reduces the dissonance between felt and displayed emotions.

Closely related is the concept of customer orientation, which describes the degree to which employees are motivated to help customers and meet their needs. Highly customer-oriented employees do not just go through the motions of service delivery. They genuinely care about ensuring customers have positive experiences.

The findings paint a concerning picture. Higher levels of customer incivility were associated with lower customer orientation and reduced deep acting. When employees are subjected to rude and disrespectful treatment from customers, they become less motivated to serve those customers well and less capable of genuinely experiencing the positive emotions their jobs require them to project.

This makes intuitive sense. When someone treats you poorly, your natural inclination is to withdraw, to protect yourself, to care less about that person’s satisfaction. For service employees, this creates a professional dilemma. Their jobs require them to care, to help, to smile, regardless of how they are treated.

The Double Burden

However, the most striking finding concerns what happens when customer incivility occurs alongside conflict with supervisors. The study found that interpersonal conflict with one’s supervisor significantly exacerbates the negative effects of customer incivility on both customer orientation and deep acting. Employees dealing with both rude customers and conflictual relationships with their bosses suffer far more damage to their ability to serve customers effectively than those dealing with customer incivility alone.

The researchers explain this through the transactional model of stress. When service employees face customer incivility, they must appraise the situation and determine how to respond while maintaining their professional composure. This requires emotional and psychological resources. However, when employees simultaneously have conflict with their supervisors, those coping resources are already depleted. They are essentially dealing with two significant stressors at once, and the combination proves particularly toxic.

An employee facing an uncivil customer can often cope by reminding themselves that it is just one difficult customer, that their supervisor and colleagues support them, that they are valued by the organisation. However, when the supervisor is a source of conflict rather than support, that coping mechanism disappears. The employee is isolated, unsupported, and doubly stressed. Their ability to maintain customer orientation and engage in deep acting crumbles under the weight of this double burden.

What This Means for Management

Organisations can no longer afford to treat internal workplace relationships as separate from customer service quality. Many businesses invest in customer service training, teaching employees techniques for handling difficult customers, but they ignore or minimise conflicts between supervisors and frontline staff.

This study makes it clear that such an approach is fundamentally flawed. The supervisor-employee relationship directly impacts every customer interaction. A supervisor who creates conflict with frontline staff is not just harming those employees—that supervisor is harming every single customer those employees interact with.

The study focused specifically on conflict with supervisors rather than coworkers. While coworker conflict likely also has negative effects, supervisor conflict appears to be particularly damaging given the power dynamics involved. Employees cannot escape their supervisors, who control many aspects of work life, from scheduling to performance evaluations to career advancement opportunities.

The implications are profound and urgent. First, organisations must recognise that supervisor selection and training for customer-facing departments is not just about operational efficiency or technical competence. The ability to build positive, supportive relationships with frontline staff should be a primary criterion.

Second, businesses need systems for identifying and addressing supervisor-employee conflict before it reaches levels that impair service quality. Regular employee engagement surveys that specifically assess the quality of supervisor relationships can serve as early warning systems.

Third, organisations should provide explicit support for employees dealing with customer incivility. Frontline staff need to know that when a customer treats them poorly, their supervisors will have their backs. They need authority to set appropriate boundaries with uncivil customers.

Additionally, senior leadership must send clear messages about the importance of positive supervisor-employee relationships. When supervisors know that their performance will be evaluated not just on operational metrics but on the quality of relationships with their teams, behaviour will change.

The Bottom Line

This research delivers a message that service organisations cannot afford to ignore. Customer incivility is damaging on its own, eroding employee motivation and their capacity for genuine emotional engagement with customers. However, when that external stressor combines with internal conflict with supervisors, the effect is not merely additive but multiplicative.

Employees facing this double stressor are fighting battles on two fronts, and service quality inevitably becomes collateral damage. Businesses serious about customer service must look inward with the same intensity they look outward. Building positive internal relationships is not a nice-to-have aspect of organisational life. It is fundamental infrastructure for service excellence.

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