Customers’ coping with interpersonal conflicts in intra and inter-cultural service encounters

Abstract

Customers may alter their conflict style depending on their cultural values’ orientations and whether the adversary belongs to their group or not. This paper provides cross-cultural insight into the psychological mechanisms that shape different styles of customer’s coping with interpersonal conflicts. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, the paper extends the framework of appraisal-emotions coping to different cultural–situational contexts and develops a set of theory-driven propositions. The insights from this conceptual paper suggest that within inter-cultural encounter contexts, an interpersonal conflict may lead to confrontative coping, for both allocentric and idiocentric customers. However, in the case of an intra-cultural encounter, the allocentrism trait may weigh against the pursuit of any conflict and therefore may increase the tendency of non-confrontational coping, while the idiocentrism trait is more likely to encourage adopting confrontative tactics regardless of the group belongingness of the frontline service employee.