An Investigation of the Role of Job Resources in Mitigating Customer-Related Social Stressors and Emotional Exhaustion

Abstract

The effects of job resources on customer-related social stressors and emotional exhaustion, including the relationships of these stressors with emotional exhaustion, are tested with a sample of frontline bank employees in Northern Cyprus. The results provide empirical support for the majority of the hypotheses. Specifically, the results suggest that supervisor support has significant negative impacts on customer verbal aggression, disliked customers, and ambiguous customer expectations. The results further suggest that coworker support alleviates disproportionate and ambiguous customer expectations. Both supervisor and coworker support exert significant effects on emotional exhaustion in the hypothesized directions. With regard to the relationships of the customer-related social stressors with emotional exhaustion, only ambiguous customer expectations have significant positive effects on emotional exhaustion. The rest of the relationships are not supported by the empirical data. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed in the study.