Abstract:This study was to investigate whether and how the customer incivility influences the counterproductive work behavior and personal initiative of the front-line employees in service enterprises. Based on the affective events theory and conservation of resources theory, we build the conceptual model of customer incivility influences the counterproductive work behavior and personal initiative through employees' negative emotion. In this study, we designed two scenario experiments to collect data from frontline employees in the catering industry,including 148 valid data in experiment 1, and 160 valid data in experiment 2. Then, we tested the model with independent-sample test, variance analysis and bootstrap method. We find that:1) Customer incivility positively relates to counterproductive work behavior, and negative emotion mediates the relationship between them. 2)Customer incivility negatively relates to personal initiative, and negative emotion mediates the relationship between them. 3)The perceived organizational support negatively regulates the influence of customer incivility on negative emotion. 4)Achievement motivation positively regulates the negative influence of negative emotion on personal initiative, and negatively regulates the positive influence of negative emotion on counterproductive work behavior.