Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Hospitality Management and Dietetics / Junehee Kwon / Service sabotage refers to employees' deliberate actions that negatively affect service, functional quality, employee-customer rapport, and company performance. Almost all frontline employees in the hospitality industry have witnessed service sabotage behaviors, and 85% admitted to engaging in such misbehaviors. Despite the prevalence and profound impact of service sabotage, it has been a challenge for researchers to measure the construct and understand specific and contextualized restaurant service sabotage behaviors. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation was to develop a reliable and valid scale to measure restaurant service sabotage. A mixed methods research design was applied. A qualitative study was conducted to explore prevalent restaurant service sabotage behaviors and to generate an item pool for the initial scale, followed by two quantitative studies with two different groups of non-managerial frontline employees in full-service restaurants to refine and validate the scale. Guided by critical incident technique, 243 critical incidents were derived from the in-depth interviews (n = 26). Of those, 28 explicit types of restaurant service sabotage behaviors were identified and further categorized into three behavioral groups: targeting customers, colleagues, and restaurants. In conjunction with scale items extracted from related measures, an initial instrument consisting of 39 items was developed and administered to an online restaurant employee panel by hiring a professional research firm. A total of 419 usable responses were collected and analyzed using principal axis factoring with a promax rotation. Results revealed a 13-item scale with three dominant factors. To validate the scale, 463 usable responses were gathered for data analyses. Results of the confirmatory factor analyses indicated a good model fit of the three-factor model, Chi-square/df=3.15, GFI=.96, CFI=.97, NFI=.95, and RMSEA=.07 while reducing the scale items from 13 to 10 and supporting the scale's dimensionality. Tests for validating construct validity were all fully supported. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were all greater than .70, showing internal consistency of the scale. This psychometrically valid and conceptually sound scale may be applied in future restaurant service sabotage research and may stimulate additional studies to advance the theory and explore the criterion network. Implications, limitations, and direction for future research are discussed.

Although ample research has been conducted to explore employee emotional labor and customer incivility at the workplace, there is limited literature examining the role of surface acting in the stressor-strain relationships associated with customer incivility. The current study focuses on the mediating effect of surface acting between customer mistreatment-emotional exhaustion and customer mistreatment-service sabotage relationships. Based on several theoretical models regarding mental and emotional resources, including the Conservation of Resources Theory and Ego Depletion Theory, it is hypothesized that a significant mediating effect of surface acting can be identified in the customer mistreatment-emotional exhaustion and customer mistreatment-service sabotage relationships. A total of 173 UCF-affiliated participants with at least a month of service working experience were recruited from the UCF SONA system and surveyed their emotional stress and interaction with customers at work to test the hypotheses. The concept of service sabotage was studied at both the individual and environmental levels to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the relationships. Deep acting as a different type of emotional labor was also inspected in the current study. Results revealed the significant relationships between surface acting and customer mistreatment, emotional exhaustion, as well as individual-level service sabotage. Results also supported the hypotheses regarding the mediating effect of surface acting on customer mistreatment predicting emotional exhaustion and individual-level service sabotage, but not environmental-level service sabotage. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, future research directions are discussed.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how emotional exhaustion (EE) impacts a boundary spanning employee's usage of service sabotage behaviors (SSB). This dissertation also investigates how perceived organizational support (POS) and perceived supervisory support (PSS) alleviate a boundary spanning employee's EE and SSB. Furthermore, this dissertation examines how extraversion (EXT) and imagination (IMAG) moderates the relationship between POS and SSB and between PSS and SSB. A boundary spanning employee is any organizational employee who "engages in job-related interactions with a person who is considered part of the environment, who is not a member of the organization" (Robertson 1995, p. 75). These employees are important as research has shown that consumers use the attitudes and behaviors of these employees to positively or negatively impact their perceptions of the service encounter (e.g. Bitner 1990; Bowen and Schneider 1985; Pugh 2001). SSB are overt or covert behaviors which negatively affect the relationship between the organization and the customer (Harris and Ogbonna 2006, 2002). Rather than the boundary spanning employee engaging in negative behaviors towards other employees or the organization as a whole, SSB are acted upon the customer. EE occurs when an employee believes they are overextended by their work (Maslach and Jackson 1981). Boundary spanning employees are forced to display organizationally desired emotions even when encountering negative customers (Cordes and Dougherty 1993; Mulki, Jaramillo and Locander 2006). This interaction between the customer and employee may result in discontent and the employee may engage in SSB as a way to show this discontent. A boundary spanner's EE is hypothesized to positively impact SSB; therefore, it is important to investigate what will reduce or mitigate a boundary spanner's EE. Two constructs that are hypothesized to reduce both EE and SSB are POS and PSS. In order to test the hypotheses developed in this dissertation, 490 non-management retail sales and customer service employees across a variety of organizations were sampled. Results found that EE positively impacts SSB. EE also partially mediates the relationship between POS and SSB. The hypotheses associated with PSS, EXT and IMAG were not supported.