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

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 m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of hospitality management 2011-03, Vol.30 (1), p.213-220
Main Authors: Wan, Lisa C., Chan, Elisa K.Y., Su, Lei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attribution
Personal similarity
Regulatory focus
Service failures
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0278-4319
1873-4693
DOI:10.1016/j.ijhm.2010.07.004