Customer no-shows pose a significant challenge in the service industry from an operational perspective, yet their consequences for employee work engagement remain unexplored. Integrating attribution theory with the literature on customer incivility, we theorize how, when, and why customer no-shows affect service employees’ work engagement. Using surveys, online experiments, and a field study analyzing over four million online classes, we demonstrate that customer no-shows reduce work engagement by eliciting perceptions of customer incivility. This negative spillover is mitigated when employees attribute the no-show to factors beyond the customer’s control or when employees have had prior positive interactions with the customer. Our findings advance theory on the antecedents and consequences of customer incivility.

wlucy2@ceibs.edu