To Protect and Serve? The Impact of Retailers’ Customer Policing Policies on Frontline Employees: An Abstract

Consumers are not always honest, nor do they always follow the rules. Research on deviant behaviors exhibited by consumers covers topics ranging from showrooming to shoplifting. Shoplifting can be a tremendous burden on retailers’ bottom lines. While FLEs have traditionally served customers, the role of these employees has evolved and expanded to include monitoring and enforcement of customers’ deviant behaviors. Thus, the role of FLEs has evolved into not only serving customers, but also to policing customer compliance. While academic studies have proposed the use of FLEs to help reduce deviant behavior, and despite acknowledgement of academia’s limited insights on the relationship between employee guardianship and organizational commitment (Potdar, Garry, Guthrie, and Gnoth 2019, p 77), little is known about the impact of using FLEs in a guardianship capacity. Thus, the current work seeks to better understand the mechanisms and outcomes of expecting FLEs to act as guardians against consumers’ deviant behaviors, in our case shoplifting.

The present study draws on appraisal theory of emotions and equity theory to investigate the impact of retailers’ customer deviant behavior policies on FLEs. Three experiments shed light on the phenomenon. Study 1 demonstrates that the addition of guardianship responsibilities to FLE duties incites anger and reduces perceptions of employee policy fairness. Study 2 expands on these findings and explores how guardianship policy elements, such as permitting vs. requiring FLEs to confront shoplifters, affect employee perceptions of the policy. Specifically, study 2 examines the role of empowerment in explaining feelings of anger and policy fairness perceptions and introduces social implications of customer (bystander) relationships. The results demonstrate the adverse effects of requiring FLEs to engage shoplifters are exacerbated in the presence of loyal (vs. transactional) customers. Study 3 explores additional policy elements such as prohibiting FLEs from approaching suspected shoplifters. This study demonstrates that as FLEs’ job role anxiety increases, policy fairness perceptions become less favorable. Additionally, Study 3 expands on the previous studies by extending the phenomenon to include more managerially relevant employee responses in the form of turnover intentions.

Across three experiments and multiple settings, we generally establish the negative effect of guardianship behavior, in our case the shoplifting policies on FLEs attitudes and job behaviors. We also identify how and when deviant behavior policy requirements can affect outcomes such as perceptions of policy fairness and employee turnover intentions.