| Summary: | Purpose: This study investigated whether food delivery riders experienced stress due to verbal abuse and vindictive customer behavior in food delivery services. Furthermore, moderating effects of social support were tested to see whether they decreased the job stress caused by verbal abuse and vindictive customer behaviors. This study exam-ined if real-time feedback can reduce employee job stress. Finally, this study evaluated whether real-time feedback influences employee engagement. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presented descriptive research to examine the relationship between verbal abuse and vindictive customer behavior, employee job stress, social support, real-time employee feedback, and engagement in Malaysia's food delivery services. This study focused on individual employees who have experience dealing with verbal abuse and vindictive customer behaviors in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Online surveys by Google forms and printed questionnaires were distributed to the respondents to obtain the information. To examine the relationship, the analysis was done using SPSS and AMOS for empirical analysis. Findings: The findings showed that verbal abuse was negatively related to employees' job stress, except vindictive customers have positively related and confirmed that social support moderates the relationship between vindictive customers and employees' job stress. Besides that, social support also moderates the relationship between vindictive customers and employees' job stress. The study succeeded in supporting the relationship between employee job stress and real-time employee feedback. Also, the results indicate positive support for the relationship between real-time feedback and employee engagement. Research limitations/implications: The study only focused on the food delivery sector; therefore, this study sug-gests that future studies should cover wide areas of the service industry. It is because jay-customer behaviors are known not only within the food delivery sector, future studies could replicate similar investigations in other service organizations such as hotels, restaurants, airlines, banks, and hospitals in the Malaysian context. Also, for the im-plication, to respond to events involving verbal abuse and vindictive customer, management can gather important information from workers who experience these behaviors and develop solutions based on their experience. Originality/value: The study is novel in its application of the conservation of resources (COR) theory to the study of verbal abuse and vindictive customer from food delivery employee's perspective and with social support from supervisors in Malaysian food delivery services scenario. © The Author(s).
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