Customer Incivility and Work-Family Conflict: The Mediating Roles of Ego-Depletion, Negative Affect and Psychological Detachment

Customer incivility has been shown to negatively impact service workers' psychological well-being and performance, exacerbating burnout, job dissatisfaction, turnover intentions, and nonproductive work behaviors such as customer-directed sabotage. To date, research has primarily focused on examining the adverse effects of customer incivility within the workplace context. However, the impact of customer incivility may extend beyond work-related health, attitudes, and behaviors, potentially affecting employees' lives after work hours. In other words, the influence of customer incivility may transcend work-family boundaries. While previous studies have explored the relationship between customer incivility and work-family conflict, they have largely focused on establishing correlations rather than elucidating the underlying mechanisms. To address this gap, the present study constructs a research model that incorporates both workplace and non-work factors as key mechanisms in the relationship between customer incivility and employees' perceived work-family conflict after work hours. For workplace factors, ego depletion based on Conservation of Resources Theory and negative affect based on Affective Events Theory were designated as key variables. For non-work factors, psychological detachment, grounded in recovery research, was established as the primary construct. A model was formulated to examine the dual mediating effects of these factors. A multilevel path analysis was conducted using survey data collected from 101 public service employees engaged in complaint-handling duties over a 10-day period. The results revealed two significant pathways through which customer incivility was positively associated with work-family conflict: (1) customer incivility → ego depletion → psychological detachment → work-family conflict, and (2) customer incivility → negative affect → psychological detachment → work-family conflict. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.