How customer incivility affects service-sector employees: A systematic literature review and a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Practitioners dedicate considerable effort to prescribe, control, and manage actions and reactions of dysfunctional customers when they interact with service sector employees. As customer incivility causes both direct damages to employees and supplemental adverse effects, arising from a sequence of malpractices, academic research in this domain is found to be a necessity. Our study presents a systematic review of the relatively scarce literature on customer incivility, that is organized around the interrogative 6 W framework, aiming to reveal academic trends, to unpack significant contributors and recent dynamics, and to recommend future directions. Together with a bibliometric analysis, we identified the characteristics of the impactful research (e.g., journals, scholar, articles, and countries) since 1997, organized the existing literature along certain themes (i.e., theories used; customer incivility conception; antecedents to customer incivility) and examined the effects of customer incivility on the performance of service sector employees. The research serves as a multidisciplinary guide for practitioners and researchers to link current research areas to future trends.