Growing digitization is accompanied by a concomitant increase in customer integration, making the customer an even more integral part of service settings, to the extent that customers even may replace employee labor. Customer integration can have positive effects for service firms and customers, but it also threatens some negative effects that have not been studied closely. This study proposes silent endurance as a neglected outcome of customer integration, caused by violations of customer fairness perceptions. In line with fairness heuristic theory, providing more input for the same output may reduce perceptions of distributive fairness. Four studies test this theorizing (one critical incident study and three experiments) to investigate the effect of being integrated on customers’ distributive fairness and silent endurance. Stable results across studies show that distributive fairness mediates the link between customer integration and silent endurance; offering monetary advantages can offset integration-induced losses of fairness perceptions. These findings thus have both theoretical and managerial implications.

Service employees’ willingness to report complaints (WRC) is an important determinant of firms’ long-term growth. Despite its importance, we know little about the factors that drive or hinder employees’ WRC. Drawing on the job demands-resources (JDR) model, we propose job resources (supervisor support and employee empowerment) and job demands (perceived customer unfriendliness and workload) as antecedents of WRC. We also examine the mediational role of organizational commitment and customer orientation, and the moderating role of country, in the effect of JDR variables on WRC. Using data from German and Chinese service employees, we show that supervisor support and workload positively affect WRC, whereas employee empowerment and customer unfriendliness negatively affect it. Thus, contradictory to the prevailing assumption that job resources help employees achieve work goals and that job demands inhibit their achievement, we show job resources (supervisor support) and demands (workload) can enhance WRC, whereas other job resources (employee empowerment) and demands (customer unfriendliness) have inhibiting effects. Organizational commitment and customer orientation mediate the impact of all JDR variables on WRC except empowerment. Furthermore, supervisor support has a more positive, while empowerment and customer unfriendliness have a more negative effect for German than for Chinese service employees. Service managers may influence WRC by managing job resources, job demands, and employee-company and employee-customer interfaces. Besides, employees from individualistic countries (Germany) are more sensitive to the JDR environment than those from collectivistic countries (China). Thus, managing job resources and demands may reap more benefits in the form of enhanced WRC in individualistic than in collectivistic countries.