Service employees represent an important part of the service itself. Their behaviour shapes customer outcomes and determines a service organization’s success. However, service employees do not always engage in organizationally desired behaviours but may also behave in a way that deviates from the organization’s norms and rules. Employee deviance is especially important to service marketers and managers, as deviant employee behaviour may detrimentally affect customer-related organizational performance. Examining the reasons why employees might engage in such deviant behaviours is therefore highly important. In prior studies of antecedents of employee deviance, scant research addresses the different types of deviance or the effects of organizational resources. Drawing on psychological contract breach theory, the current research proposes a model that links two job demands (mental pressure, perceived customer unfriendliness) as antecedents of psychological contract breaches with two types of service employee deviance (process and general workplace deviance). Most importantly, it considers the moderating role of organizational resources (perceived organizational support, supervisor knowledge). The results reveal that supervisor knowledge weakens the effect of the job demands on process deviance. The moderating effect of supervisor knowledge on the effects of mental pressure and perceived customer unfriendliness on general workplace deviance are non-significant though. These results reinforce the close connection between the more active form of process deviance and the organization. Surprisingly, perceived organizational support strengthens the relationships between mental pressure and perceived customer unfriendliness on process deviance in our study. This result is counterintuitive and may point to an interesting phenomenon: when highly supported by the organization, employees may feel they do not ‘own’ the task process and as a result, their responsibility for the process slips. These findings underscore the important yet insufficiently explored role of organizational resources in buffering the detrimental effect of job demands, with implications for service marketing and management research and practice.
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