Why and when customer-related social stressors impair service performance: A conservation of resources perspective

Building on the conservation of resources theory, we investigate how customer-related social stressors impact service performance among hospitality employees. To explore this, we gathered data from 350 supervisor-employee pairs across twelve hotels in China through a three-wave survey. The results show that customer-related social stressors detrimentally affect work engagement, which in turn reduces service performance. Furthermore, job social support and employees’ social skills emerge as two key moderators, buffering both the direct impact of customer-related social stressors on work engagement and the indirect effect on service performance via work engagement. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of the interactions among customer-related social stressors, work engagement, and service performance, offering significant implications for both theory and practice.