Abstract: Customer aggression is defined as a series of unacceptable hostile behaviors exhibited by a current or former customer of an organization towards an employee that creates an intimidating, frightening or offensive situation, and these hostile behaviors will exert negative impact on the employees’ working performance. Customer aggression is the concentrated reflection of workplace aggression behaviors in service industries. In this paper, we analyze the influential factors of customer aggression from the aspects of individual factors and situational factors. The related negative impact of the customer aggression include psychological/emotional reactions, physical harm and work–related negative outcomes. Before making the useful evaluation and expectation for the further research, we discuss the coping strategy of customer aggression behaviors from two aspects: individual coping strategies and organizational coping strategies.

Key words: customer aggression, service industry, workplace