The impact of jay customer behaviors on bank service providers' organizational commitment: The mediating role of job stress and moderating effect of emotional intelligence

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of jay customer behaviors, namely verbal abuse, physical abuse, and sexual harassment, on front-line service employees’ organizational commitment and its aspects: affective commitment, continuance commitment, and normative commitment in the era of COVID-19. In addition, this research investigates the mediating role of job stress and examines the moderating effect of emotional intelligence and its four dimensions: Self-emotion appraisal, others’ emotion appraisal, use of emotion, and regulation of emotion. The quota sampling technique was used to invite 120 respondents working in Palestinian banks to answer a survey. After removing incomplete questionnaires, 108 responses were retained in the study. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to test the proposed research model. The results demonstrated that jay-customer behavior has a significant inverse impact on employees’ organizational commitment. The relationship between jay customer behaviors and employees’ organizational commitment was partially mediated by job stress. Surprisingly, neither emotional intelligence nor any of its sub-variables moderated the influence. The research with its distinctive model is supposed to enrich the literature with insightful findings derived from the direct and indirect examined hypotheses that have contributed to an enhanced understanding of the relationship between the variables. Managers in the banking industry could use the findings to understand jay-customers further. On the other hand, the results could be used as a guideline to make more efficient improvements to minimize their impact on employees’ organizational commitment. Other valuable theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.