When will customers care about service failures that happened to strangers? The role of personal similarity and regulatory focus and its implication on service evaluation
Document Type
Journal article
Source Publication
International Journal of Hospitality Management
Publication Date
1-1-2011
Volume
30
Issue
1
First Page
213
Last Page
220
Keywords
Attribution, Personal similarity, Regulatory focus, Service failures
Abstract
This paper examines an interesting research question: how does a service failure that happen to a stranger customer influence an observing customer's service evaluation? Drawing on the defensive attribution theory and regulatory focus theory, we argue that an observing customer will attribute more (vs. less) blame to the company if the customer involved in the undesirable incident is personally similar (vs. not similar) to him/her. These attributions, in turn, will influence the observing customers to form a negative evaluation on service quality of the company. More importantly, a prevention-focused tendency will intensify the negative impact of personal similarity on service evaluation. Results from two experiments confirmed the hypotheses.
DOI
10.1016/j.ijhm.2010.07.004
Print ISSN
02784319
Funding Information
Financial support from the Lingnan University of Hong Kong in the form of an Academic Programmes Research Grant (DB 10A7).
Publisher Statement
Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. Access to external full text or publisher's version may require subscription.
Full-text Version
Publisher’s Version
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Wan, L. C., Chan, E. K. Y., & Su, L. (2011). When will customers care about service failures that happened to strangers? The role of personal similarity and regulatory focus and its implication on service evaluation. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 30(1), 213-220. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2010.07.004