Be tolerable or be angry? A situation of relationship norm conflict in failure

Document Type

Journal article

Source Publication

Advances In Consumer Research

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Volume

37

First Page

451

Last Page

451

Publisher

Association for Consumer Research

Abstract

While previous literature has agreed that friendships work well in mitigating consumer dissatisfaction in failures, this paper argues that a friendship may not always work. Drawing from the communal-exchange relationship framework (Clark and Mills 1979) and the psychological contract theory (Rousseau 1989), this paper suggests that communal (vs. exchange) consumers would be less dissatisfied in an implicit promise breach, but a reverse pattern would occur in an explicit promise breach. In addition, self-construal would moderate the interactive relationship between relationship type and promise breach type on consumer dissatisfaction. Two experiments with different consumption contexts provide convergent evidence of the hypotheses.

Print ISSN

00989258

Publisher Statement

Copyright © The Association for Consumer Research.

Additional Information

Paper presented at the 40th Annual Conference of the Association-for-Consumer-Research (ACR), Oct 22-25, 2009, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

ISBN of the source publication: 9780915552658

Language

English

Recommended Citation

Wan, L. C., & Hui, M. K. (2010). Be tolerable or be angry? A situation of relationship norm conflict in failure. In Advances In Consumer Research (pp. 451-451). Duluth: Association for Consumer Research.

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