IMPACT OF WORKPLACE OSTRACISM ON WORKPLACE DEVIANCE AND SERVICE SABOTAGE: ROLE OF EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION AND MORAL IDENTITY

Abstract

Ostracism is a pervasive phenomenon commonly observed in today’s workplaces. It is a workplace stressor known to have deleterious consequences for the employees and the organizations; however, not much is known about its impact in the Indian context. The current research has a fourfold purpose. First, it aims to explore the prevalence of workplace ostracism in the Indian hospitality industry. Second, it intends to shed light on the seriousness of workplace ostracism by examining if it can trigger high-intensity misbehaviors like workplace deviance and customer-oriented service sabotage. Third, it aims to explore the mediating mechanism facilitating workplace ostracism’s impact on frontline employees’ behavioral outcomes in Indian hotels. Finally, it proposes to explore the buffering role of a highly underexplored individual factor, i.e., employees’ moral identity centrality (MIC) in curbing the negative impact of workpace ostracism. The “conservation of resources theory (COR),” the “social exchange theory (SET),” and the “social cognitive model of moral identity (SCMMI)” were integrated to offer theoretical support to the conceptual framework proposed in the current research. The data was gathered from 345 frontline employees working in the hotels situated in the state of Uttarakhand, India. SEM, AMOS, and SPSS were used to analyze the gathered data. The research findings revealed that workplace ostracism can trigger employees’ deviant and customer-oriented service sabotage behaviors (COSS), and emotional exhaustion mediates workplace ostracism’s association with workplace deviance and COSS. Also, the moral identity centrality (MIC) was found to mitigate workplace ostracism’s adverse influence on hotel employees’ workplace behavior. The current work makes substantial contributions to the existing literature and provides invaluable insights to the organizations and the HR managers about how to handle workplace ostracism and curb its negative impact. Finally, the current work concludes by explicating the limitations of the current research and some novel and intriguing directions for scholars and researchers for the future research.