Abstract: Due to the asymmetry of power between customers and employees, the majority of customers would end their service interactions with negative emotion in order to report or resolve the problems. On the basis of cognitive appraisal theory of emotion and resource conservation theory, this paper collects and refers to the related literatures and makes a survey on 348 paired customers and employees by adopting the questionnaire method, so as to investigate the mechanism of customer-employee negative emotional contagion. The result shows that the customer negative emotion can influence the employees’ emotional work through their perceived customer justice. The collectivism tendency of the employees and the service atmosphere around the organization can alleviate the impact of customers’ negative emotion on employee-perceived customer justice. In addition, based on the discussion about the research result, it puts forward some suggestions for service enterprises to prevent and deal with customers’ negative emotion.

Key words: emotional contagion; customer negative emotion; emotional labor; perceived customer justice