Abstract: Customer-oriented deviant behaviors (CODB), refer to frontline employees’ behaviors aiming to service customers while breaking organizational rules and norms. CODB has received increasing attention and has become an emerging research topic in academia. By reviewing the literature, we found that CODB studies vary in its theoretical basis and evolution pattern across the organizational behavior domain and the service management domain. Four aspects of factors have been found to predict CODB, including employees’ individual differences, job characteristics, organizational context, and customer behaviors. CODB has shown a double-edged sword effect on both customer and employee outcomes and the organization as a whole. Future research should take a more comprehensive lens to advance CODB research, including clarifying its concept and measurement, exploring employees’ motives behind these behaviors, identifying how these behaviors are influenced by organizational policies and managerial behaviors, and examining both the benefits and costs of CODB and their associated boundary conditions.

Key words: customer-oriented deviance behaviors, prosocial violation, deviance motive