Customer-directed sabotage refers to employees’ counterproductive work behavior that negatively affects service and harms customers’ legitimate interests (Wang et al., 2011). While it can manifest in many different behaviors, such as a flight attendant yelling at a passenger “Shut up! I’m not your servant” (Land, 2022) and a call center agent intentionally putting a customer on hold for a long period of time (Skarlicki et al., 2008), customer-directed sabotage has been conceptualized and studied as one broad concept. We consider a subtle-obvious dimension in the conceptualization and measurement of customer-directed sabotage. We contend that doing so enables a more precise examination of customer-directed sabotage and its relationship with employee motives and outcomes. Using a sample of 300 service employees, we conducted a critical incident technique-based survey to gather customer-directed sabotage events and uncover service employee motives for and outcome of customer-directed sabotage. We explored the relationship between employee motives (i.e., employee boredom, customer mistreatment) and customer-directed sabotage as well as the relationship between customer-directed sabotage and employee outcome (i.e., sense of power). Also, given the power dynamic inherent in employee–customer relationship, we examined employee chronic powerlessness as a potential moderator to the relationship between customer-directed sabotage and sense of power. We discuss implications of our findings.
