Structural Review of Customer Incivility and Social Competences of Frontline Employees for Prevention and Mitigation

Abstract

Frontline employees play a crucial role in determining service quality and satisfaction, but customer incivility (CI) has a detrimental effect on the employees’ motivation and commitment to service. Given its significance, CI studies have rapidly grown to understand its diverse effects. The goal of this study is to review, critique, and suggest a new theoretical synthesis. This study performs a structural review of existing literature that discusses not only CI’s direct effect on emotional stress, work attitudes, job performance, and behavior changes but also its mediators and moderators to elucidate the complexity and dynamism of CI outcomes. Based on a critical review, this study highlights the limitations of the unidirectional perspective of existing literature. To address the question of why CI happens and how to prevent and mitigate its harmful effects, this study proposes a conceptual transition to the interactive perspective and adopts a social competence theory. As a theoretical synthesis, this study proposes sub-dimensions of frontline employees’ social competences, including social skills, nonverbal communication abilities, service adaptiveness, and coping strategies, and generates propositions about their impact on the prevention and mitigation of CI’s negative effects. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.