Information technology customer aggression: The importance of an organizational climate of support

Abstract

Information technology personnel are often ill prepared to react in a positive fashion to the aggressive communications from their customers, the users. Being able to regulate the emotions spiked by aggressive customer behavior is important to the long term health and retention of IT employees. Surface acting responses, the ability to display false emotions to mask strong emotions, is common, but not better for the long term health of the individual or organization. Deep acting responses, where emotional responses are modified to encourage expected behavior, are the better response and can be promoted with an organizational climate of support. A model derived from emotion response theory demonstrates these relationships hold for IT employees, who tend to be more introverted than most employees and often react differently to aggressive communication from customers. The model is verified with a sample of IT employees in Taiwan companies. Organizations should provide a climate of support for IT personnel and train them on how to respond appropriately to customer aggression through emotion regulation strategies in a direction that promotes better relationships.

Introduction

Facing rapid changes and advances in information technologies (IT), IT professionals are expected not only to have the technical skills, but also the customer service expertise in order to survive in the highly competitive industry [25], [26]. Service providers in other industries such as flight attendants and front desk employees in hotels are usually well trained for their jobs in dealing with people and on better serving customers. However, IT professionals are usually better trained in dealing with computers instead of human beings. Studies show that exceptional IT student recruits are introverted, suggesting that these new IT professionals in the field tend to enjoy working alone and may get overwhelmed with too much social interaction [7], [31]. In other words, they may not have the desire to interact with customers, especially to deal with those frustrated and irritated [22].

In the era of emphasizing service quality and customer satisfaction, IT professionals, when viewed as service providers, are expected not only to have up-to-date technical skills and domain knowledge, but also provide quality service to satisfy their customers [29]. The need for frequent interaction with customers (both internal and external) requires these IT service providers display regulated emotions, especially facing impatient, angry and argumentative customers [10]. Researchers have called for studies in so-called high emotional labor jobs [8], [21]. One recent study showed that 20% of work incidents specifically challenging to IT professionals were managing clients [19]. Thus, when interfacing with customers, emotion regulation strategies become essential in their daily work.

When IT professionals face negative emotional events, how do they respond to the situation emotionally? According to emotion regulation theory, when a person faces an emotional situation, different regulating strategies will be adopted with different responses and outcomes. In IT related jobs, there are expectations on what ‘appropriate’ observable emotions toward customers are, which is viewed as emotional labor [31]. Emotional labor may involve suppressing or faking emotions that bring stress and mental effort to the service providers. The traditional view of the workplace as a rational environment may not be the most productive: workplace emotions are good predictors of individual and organizational outcomes [2], [11]. In addition, inappropriate emotional management leads to negative effects on psychological well-being, such as job satisfaction [33].

This study begins an examination of how IT professionals regulate their emotions when facing negative emotional situations and any effect on job performance. This issue is important because of a lack of studies focusing on the antecedents applying to the IT professional context [20]. Further, this study intends to understand what roles an organization plays in supporting valuable human resources in the face of angry customers. Specifically, the following three questions are considered: (1) what emotion regulation strategies are employed when IT professionals face verbal aggression from customers?; (2) How do different emotion regulation strategies affect the IT professionals’ job satisfaction; and (3) Does an organizational climate of support play a role in helping IT professionals counter the stressful circumstances from aggressive customers? Being able to adopt the right emotion regulation strategy helps IT professionals better cope with highly stressful and demanding job aspects, and result in greater job satisfaction.