Abstract

The dark side of customer behavior has been receiving increasing attention in the business and management literature in recent years. Scholars have used various terminologies to study those customer behaviors that disrupt service delivery, affect organizational performance, and impact on employees’ well-being. In this study, through a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of 246 academic articles, we identify three clusters within the dark side of customer behavior literature: (1) customer dysfunctional behavior; (2) customer revenge and rage as forms of customer misbehavior; and (3) customer mistreatment and incivility-related clusters. Based on these three identified clusters of the literature, we propose an integrative framework of customer incivility as customer incivility is the current centerpiece of the literature on the dark side of customer behavior. In doing so, we identify various research gaps and suggest effective avenues for future works in this research stream.

Introduction

In a customer-centric approach, serving customers and consumers effectively remains the cornerstone of successful business outcomes such as high firm performance, stronger brand value, and customer loyalty (Gupta & Ramachandran, 2021). Nevertheless, this shift towards customer-centricity also brought along detrimental customer behaviors. Hence, nowadays firms seek to understand how to deal with an increasing number of negative behaviors from customers as these negatively affect business outcomes as well as employees’ performance and psychological well-being (Hur et al., 2015, Yagil, 2017).

In this paper, we refer to these negative behaviors by using an umbrella term, the dark side of customer behavior, inspired by the dyadic relationship that exists between the “light” and the “dark” side of the Force in George Lucas’ creation Star Wars, and that is also represented in Western and Eastern philosophical and religious worldviews (Eberl, 2016) as well as in management literature (a couple of examples are the work of Davenport et al., 2007, Heidenreich et al., 2015 that conceptualized dark sides of different management processes and outcomes).

The dark side of customer behavior is an umbrella term for various concepts that scholars in consumer research and organizational research have used to define negative behaviors of consumers and customers. For example, Lovelock (2001) coined the term jay-customers for those customers who act inconsiderately, in a vulgar manner, and cause problems for the organization, other customers, and employees. The term dysfunctional customers is also used when investigating the behaviors of those individuals who deliberately or unintentionally, overtly or covertly disrupt the otherwise functional service delivery process (Fullerton and Punj, 2004, Harris and Reynolds, 2003). Other scholars coined the terms customer revenge and retaliation (e.g. Funches et al., 2009, Grégoire et al., 2010), which are seen as the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral efforts of customers in redistributing justice and fairness, and in punishing a corporation for its wrongdoings.

Conclusions

In this article we provided further clarity on the dark side of customer behavior. Our findings show that the dark side of customer behavior has been a prolific field of research across multiple disciplines beyond business and marketing research. Indeed, the topic has been examined through the lenses of psychology, organizational management, and sociology, and in varied sector studies such as hospitality.

The bibliometric analysis uncovered the development of the dark side of customer and consumer behavior research between 1976 and 2022. An assessment of the number of published articles over time, as well as the performance of authors, institutions, journals, and countries, has been performed. The findings from this analysis show that researchers in the United States, Australia, and China are the ones that have been more active in investigating this phenomenon. Furthermore, co-citation networks have been developed and analyzed to understand how the dark side of customer behavior field is structured. The Journal of Business Research emerged as a pivotal journal in this field.