Purpose Service providers can potentially play a critical role in responding to the global refugee crisis. However, recent evidence suggests that local service employees’ negative and inappropriate behavior is hindering efforts to alleviate the problems faced by refugees. As a response to the call to action to engage with the global refugee crisis in service context and adopting the transformative service research perspective, this paper aims to understand service employees’ motivations to engage in sabotage when they interact with refugees in service settings. Design/methodology/approach This paper focuses on the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey as a context. Using a netnographic study, this study analyzes comments by Turkish service employees in different social media groups and newspapers’ online platforms to reveal the motivations of those employees to engage in sabotage behavior. Findings The findings of this study revealed employees use five emerging themes as potential motivations to justify their sabotage behavior when serving refugees: perceived scarcity of resources, perceived fairness, perceived identity mismatch, perceived role of government and perceived role of other nations. Research limitations/implications The findings of this study have implications for service organizations, communities and governments to manage, change and even remove some of those perceptions that lead to employee sabotage resulting in increased suffering of refugees. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the employee sabotage behavior in the context of serving refugees.