The relationship between empowerment, aggressive behaviours of customers, coping, and burnout

Research on workplace aggression has mainly investigated aggression on the part of supervisors or colleagues. Within the service context, however, customers constitute an additional major source of aggression. The study examines the associations between customer aggression and service providers' sense of empowerment, coping strategies, and burnout. Questionnaires measuring customer aggression, empowerment, coping strategies used to cope with customer aggression, and burnout (including exhaustion, depersonalization, and accomplishment dimensions) were completed by 228 service providers. The main results, based on path analysis, showed that empowerment was negatively related to exhaustion and depersonalization while customer aggression was positively related to these dimensions of burnout. Depersonalization was also positively related to emotion-focused coping. The accomplishment dimension was positively related to empowerment and problem-focused coping. Customer aggression and empowerment were negatively related. The conclusion is that customer aggression and emotion-focused coping are associated with high burnout, whereas empowerment can attenuate both customer aggression and service provider burnout.