Loading…

An examination of the emotions that follow a failure of co-creation

Service research has contributed to our understanding of the externally-directed emotions that customers experience, such as anger. However, there is limited knowledge about the self-directed emotions that customers experience, such as shame and guilt. This knowledge is specifically lacking within t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business research 2017-09, Vol.78, p.43-52
Main Authors: Sugathan, Praveen, Ranjan, Kumar Rakesh, Mulky, Avinash G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Service research has contributed to our understanding of the externally-directed emotions that customers experience, such as anger. However, there is limited knowledge about the self-directed emotions that customers experience, such as shame and guilt. This knowledge is specifically lacking within the context of failure of co-created products and services. Our mixed-method research delineates the self-directed emotions that arise when co-created products and services fail. We found that failure of co-created products differ from general situations of failure in that externally-directed emotions attain latency and customers experience self-directed emotions such as guilt, shame, and self-pity. We also found that the self-directed emotions are driven by (a), sadness, and (b), the nature of the causal attributions that the customers ascribe to the failure. This effect was moderated by the degree of co-creation. After analyzing our findings, we discuss the theoretical and practical relevance of the study. •Failure of co-creation leads to self-directed emotions such as guilt, shame, self-pity.•Attribution to effort leads to guilt while attribution to ability leads to shame.•Immediate emotion of sadness influences further attribution-dependent emotions.
ISSN:0148-2963
1873-7978
DOI:10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.04.022