Negative Relational Exchanges of Customers and Employees: Performance and Well-being Implications

Dening what is a customer is not as easy as it seems, especially in today’s service-driven economy. For the purpose of this chapter, we dene customers as those outside the organization who interact with members of the organization (i.e., service providers) because they may be interested in obtaining goods (e.g., tangible outcome) or services (e.g., intangible outcome) from the organization (Bowen & Schneider, 1988). e rst key aspect of this denition is the emphasis on customers outside the organizational boundaries. We acknowledge that some jobs have exchanges with internal customers (e.g., human resource personnel), but we focus on external customers who may be less constrained by the organizational policies and norms. e second key aspect is that our denition excludes occupations where typical interactions are with outsiders who are not seeking services or goods (e.g., police ocers or bill collectors; Hart, Wearing, & Headey, 1995; Sutton, 1991). ese atypical types of encounters with customers are expected to be negative and thus involve dierent processes that deserve separate attention.