Abstract
Faced with deviant customer behavior, how to lead your salespeople to succeed through emotion management has gained increasing attention. The objective of our study is to investigate the effect of customer mistreatment on salespeople’s emotional labor strategies, which affect their success and satisfaction. We also consider the moderating role of self-esteem in this frontline mechanism. The results from our field survey with 269 salespeople show that customer mistreatment significantly affects emotional labor strategies, leading to their attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Particularly, we find that these effects are stronger for young salespeople