Abstract: As one of the “dark sides” of the external organization, the negative impact of customer mistreatment on employee′s job performance cannot be ignored. Based on Affective Events Theory and Conservation of Resources Theory, this paper discusses the impact of customer mistreatment on job performance from the perspective of emotional exhaustion by taking “events-emotion-attitude and behavior” as the main line and tests the regulating effect of job embeddedness. The results show that: customer mistreatment has a significantly positive effect on emotional exhaustion, and has a significantly negative impact on job performance, emotional exhaustion plays an intermediary role between customer mistreatment and job performance,and job embeddedness plays a regulating role between customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion; job embeddedness adjusts the indirect impacts of employee′s job performance caused by emotional exhaustion, which means when the rate of job embeddedness is higher, the impact of the intermediary role of emotional exhaustion will be smaller. This paper explains the negative impact of customer mistreatment from a new theoretical perspective, and reveals the internal mechanism and conditions of customer mistreatment on employees′ job performance.

Key words: customer mistreatment, emotional exhaustion, job embeddedness, job performance