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

Practitioners dedicate considerable effort to prescribe, control, and manage actions and reactions of dysfunc-tional 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.