Abstract: Service industry employees often encounter customer incivility, which will not only have a negative impact on employees’ emotions, attitudes, behaviors and performance, but also have a greater impact on bystanders. At present, few scholars have explored the impact of customer incivility on service employees from the perspective of bystanders, especially from the perspective of colleagues as bystanders. Based on the theory of social information processing, this paper explores the double-edged sword effect of the helping behaviors and the negative workplace gossip performed by the colleagues as bystanders who observed customer incivility on the employees that encountered uncivil behaviors by taking emotional support and schadenfreude as mediators and task interdependence as moderators, respectively. The results of the data analysis of 320 valid questionnaires collected in three stages show that the emotional support and schadenfreude of the coworkers can play a mediating role between OCI and helping behaviors, and between OCI and negative gossip behaviors. The task interdependence plays a moderating role, when task interdependence is high, OCI is positively correlated with bystanders’ emotional support; when task interdependence is low, OCI is positively correlated with bystanders’ schadenfreude. The task interdependence moderates the mediating effects of emotional support and schadenfreude. When the task interdependence is higher, the indirect effect of OCI on employees’ helping behaviors through coworkers’ emotional support will be stronger, and the indirect effect of OCI on employees’ negative gossip behaviors through coworkers’ schadenfreude will be weaker. These research conclusionshave enriched the researches in the field of bystander of customer incivility, providing some enlightenment for managers to reduce the negative impact of customer incivility.

Key words: observed customer incivility, emotional support, schadenfreude, helping behavior, negative workplace gossip