Discrete emotional responses and face-to-face complaining: The joint effect of service failure type and culture

Abstract

Understanding customer responses to service failures enable practitioners to minimize the negative impact of service failures. The purpose of this study is to examine the joint effect of service failure type and culture (power distance) on two discrete negative emotions and investigate the mediating role of discrete negative emotions in driving face-to-face complaining and switching behavior across two cultures (The US and China). Our findings suggest that customers in a high-power distance culture (China) feel higher levels of anger and disappointment following a process (vs. outcome) failure, and therefore, are more likely to complain face-to-face and switch. Whereas customers in a low-power distance culture (US) only feel higher levels of disappointment following an outcome (vs. process) failure, yet prefer to switch silently. Our findings provide hospitality firms with practical implications on employee training and how to proactively identify service failures that customers are unlikely to complain about.