Customer Service Employees’ Adaptability Towards Environments

Abstract

This study examined the link between personality characteristics and emotional exhaustion among customer service workers. The live survey application S was employed to conduct a web-based questionnaire survey of customer service workers in the United States in March 2021 with 50 questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents (65.78%) reported that they had felt emotional exhaustion. This study used descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and moderated regression analyses to test the hypotheses. The primary purpose of this study was to relate the basic personality of an individual to the perception of emotional exhaustion. However, the findings led to insights into whether emotional exhaustion perceived by the customer service employees caused personality traits or the social and environmental phenomenon caused in COVID-19. The results suggested that employees’ emotional exhaustion was caused by environmental, situational, and social phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic at the time rather than individual characters. The result also indicated that employees with high levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and job satisfaction can quickly reduce and control their emotional exhaustion when experiencing conflicts.