Helping to reduce fights before flights: How environmental stressors in organizations shape customer emotions and customer–employee interactions
研究了机场环境中，环境压力源（如高温、噪音）如何通过引发顾客愤怒或恐惧，既导致顾客攻击行为和员工帮助减少，又可能通过恐惧引发员工同情和帮助。
Abstract Previous examinations of environmental stressors in organizations have mostly emphasized their dysfunctional effects on individuals’ emotions and behaviors. Extending this work by drawing from the social functional perspective on emotion, we propose that customers’ negative emotional responses to environmental stressors in organizations can exert both dysfunctional and functional effects on customer–employee interactions. Specifically, we theorize that situational and physiological forms of environmental stressors can be dysfunctional by incurring customer anger, precipitating customer aggression, and diminishing employee helpfulness. We further theorize that situational relative to physiological stressors can exert functional effects in inducing customer fear that elicits empathy and helpfulness from employees. We test our model via an archival, observational, and critical incident yoked experimental study set in the airport context. This research contributes to stress theory and its organizational application by integrating theory from the social functional approach to emotion with appraisal‐based theories of stress in organizations.