Employee retaliation in service encounters

While customer retaliation has received wide attention in marketing literature in recent years, the opposite perspective has not yet received much of attention in the services literature. Drawing on the reciprocity paradigm, we propose that employees will reward or punish customers for their behavior in the service interaction.

We test this proposition in a field-experimental setting, manipulating customer behavior as the independent variable and measuring employees’ reactions according to the customer behavior they had been exposed to. We thus aim at bringing closer together services marketing and services HR and contributing to the literature on service interaction of customers and employees. We seek to analyze to what extent the phenomenon of “employee retaliation” in fact exists.