Frontline Employees’ Empathy in Service Recovery: a Systematic Literature Review and Agenda for the Future

Frontline employees’ empathy is critical in recovering the service with angry customers: it mitigates the likelihood of adverse behaviors and increases service recovery satisfaction. However, the current understanding of empathy in service recovery is considerably limited. It relies on customers’ appraisal of frontline employees’ normative empathic display while ignoring the emotional dynamics of angry customer encounters from the frontline employees’ perspective. Therefore, we systematically reviewed 20 years of empirical studies on empathy in service recovery to assess the current state of the art. The findings confirmed a critical blind spot in the literature. No study investigated the effects of customers’ angry emotions on frontline employees’ empathy and its subsequent impact on emotional labor, empathic concern, and prosocial service behaviors. Moreover, findings revealed inconsistent definitions, measures, and interpretations of emotion and empathy that weaken the current state of the art. Our discussion offers recommendations fostering research on the mediating effect of frontline employees’ empathy on service recovery process quality and customer satisfaction.