Nineteenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Limited attention has been devoted to the study of restaurants in which customer sovereignty is a major focus of managers and yet, front line employees experience endemic customer behaviours. The aim of this study is to explore how front line service employees cope with customer incivility in the context of full-service ethnic restaurants. The main objective is to supply information on the ways how do the experience and gender of employees; as well as, the diversity of customers shape and influence the coping strategies of service employees when they experience customer incivility at three different stages (at the time of the incident, post-incident, post-shift). This qualitative-ethnographic study collected data via participant-observations, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews. The research implicates that gender and nationality stereotypes, power dynamics, difference in language and peoples’ expectation of authenticity are the main triggers of incivility in the context of this study.