The Underlying Mechanisms between Customer Incivility and Employee’s Response: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Past studies have been conducted on the consequences of customer incivility toward frontline employees, but not much is known about the underlying mechanism, that is, what mediates or moderates frontline employee’s response towards customer incivility. It has been challenging to perform a systematic review on this research topic because previous studies did not include the review procedures, hence presenting a substantial challenge for other researchers to interpret or replicate. Therefore, the aim of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review of the extant literature focusing on frontline employee’s response due to customer incivility. The review was conducted following five key methodological steps, which are guided by ROSES as the review protocol. The process included formulation of research questions, followed by utilizing the systematic searching strategies (identification, screening, and eligibility) on two main and two supporting databases namely Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Dimensions. Next, quality appraisal of the articles was performed and data extraction using thematic analysis approach was conducted on 26 articles that were systematically selected for this review. The analysis generated 44 variables and 15 sub-themes as the underlying mechanisms of the employee’s response to customer incivility, which are further grouped into two main themes: 1) personal factors; and (2) situational factors.