Abstract: School of History and Society, Huaibei Normal University, Huaibei 235000, China) Abstract：As a kind of negative behavior in service interaction, customer mistreatment has negative effects that cannot be ignored on employees′ self-control resources, psychological resources and work enthusiasm. This paper constructs a moderated mediation model to examine the influence and its internal mechanism of customer mistreatment on work alienation of hotel front-line staffs from the perspective of ego depletion. Through two stages of tracking survey on 522 front-line staffs in 19 high-star hotels, research hypothesis is empirically verified by data analysis, and results show that customer mistreatment has a significantly positive effect on work alienation of hotel front-line staffs, and ego depletion partially mediates the relationship between customer mistreatment and work alienation; internal-external control tendency plays a significantly moderating role between customer mistreatment and ego depletion, and the mediated moderation model implies that internal-external control significantly regulate the indirect relationship between customer mistreatment and work alienation through partially mediated by ego depletion. This paper interprets the negative effects of customer mistreatment from a new theoretical perspective, and it is conducive to clarifying the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of customer mistreatment affecting work alienation of hotel front-line staffs, and it can provide better guidance for hotel management practices, and then, the hotel, employees and customers will achieve mutual benefit and win-win.

Key words: ego depletion, customer mistreatment, work alienation, internal-external control tendency