Customer Mistreatment Among Frontline Staff in Social Care: Supporting Employees Through HRM Practices
研究了社会照护行业一线员工遭遇的顾客不当对待类型，基于心理契约理论分析员工对人力资源管理的支持期望，提出FRESH框架帮助人力资源专业人员识别并弥补支持缺口。
ABSTRACT The social care sector across the globe is increasingly witnessing customer mistreatment incidents that pose significant personal and work‐related challenges for frontline employees. Extant research suggests that human resource management (HRM) can be instrumental in extending support to the frontline to overcome the adversities of such mistreatment. In this study, we first develop a comprehensive account of the types of customer mistreatment prevalent in social care. Then, drawing on psychological contract theory, we outline the frontline's expectations of support from HRM practices to deal with such incidents. We further elaborate on gaps in social care that inhibit extending such support through HRM practices to the frontline and establish how the HR co‐creation approach can be utilized to plug these gaps. In this multistage qualitative study, we collect data in three stages from 51 frontline employees and 15 HR professionals working in the social care sector who have witnessed customer mistreatment. Based on our study's findings, we propose a novel framework called “FRESH against mistreatment” (Frontline Expectations for Support from HRM), which can aid HR professionals in identifying expectations, gaps, and possibilities for extending support through HRM practices to the frontline in social care to handle incidents of customer mistreatment.