What's Wrong with a Rumor? Workplace Undermining and Customer-Oriented Outcomes

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the customer-oriented outcomes of supervisor and co-worker undermining, specifically, examining the differential impact of supervisor and co-worker undermining on customer- and service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and customer-directed counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB). Positive and negative affectivity were assessed, the latter being a commonly utilized control variable within social undermining literature, to identify their moderating impact. Results indicate that supervisor and coworker undermining do not share a significant relationship with customer and service-oriented OCB, and were not adequate in predicting their presence alone. After adding positive and negative affect, the relationship was significant, with positive affect predicting both engagement in service-oriented OCB, as well as customer-oriented OCB. Supervisor and coworker undermining, were, however, significant and positive indicators of engagement in customer-directed CWB, with negative affect also emerging as a strong predictor. Results suggest that, although customer- and service-oriented OCB were not associated to supervisor or coworker undermining, customer-directed CWB was significantly associated and should be investigated further to unravel the temporal relationship between undermining and engagement in customer-directed CWB, and also to isolate the presence of negative affect in this relationship.