Piecing together Customer Incivility and Employee Well-Being: A Critical Literature Review and Research Agenda

The purpose of the paper is to critically evaluate the literature on customer incivility. Review of literature was effective in studying customer incivility in the context of employee well-being, especially when customers are served by the employees placed at different levels and hierarchies of the organization. The paper also indicates core areas in customer incivility and employee well- being for the future researchers. The approach to gather data was systematic in terms of articles published in various management journals which are either subscribed by the institutions or available free through open-access databases. An impartial cross-referencing method was adopted so that the articles are categorized and tabulated under different headings, such as distribution of articles in various journals, methods and sampling techniques, statistical methods observed in various journals, distribution of articles in terms of time periods, countries, coverage of issues, methodology adopted, and database sources.

Further, findings helped in identifying the gaps in the literature. Discussion was critical in building logical arguments in the context of background of customer incivility, contributing factors and how such misbehavior can be possibly mitigated to improve healthy and harmonious relationship between customers and employees; those who are available to serve the customers 24 × 7 environment. The paper concludes by generating the awareness about customer incivility in terms

of mitigating the impact in the context of employees in organization. Future scope of research in customer incivility has also been proposed.