Things We Do, Costs We Yet Don’t Know: Social Sharing as a Catalyst of Service Sabotage

Building on recent advancements in moral disengagement theory and shared reality theory, we propose that employees do not need to directly experience frequent customer mistreatment to trigger their moral disengagement. Specifically, when employees frequently share their mistreatment experiences with coworkers, even infrequent instances of customer mistreatment can evoke heightened levels of moral disengagement. Conversely, when social sharing occurs less frequently, infrequent instances of customer mistreatment are associated with lower levels of moral disengagement, while more frequent customer mistreatment is linked to higher levels of moral disengagement, which then positively relates to service sabotage, indicating a positive indirect effect of the frequency of customer mistreatment on service sabotage through moral disengagement. Results from two independent time-lagged studies involving samples of call center employees (Sample 1 of Study 1), casino cage cashiers (Sample 2 of Study 1), and service representatives (Study 2) recruited from an online research platform, lend support to our propositions.