Purpose
This paper aims to study the citations made in service failure literature and assesses the knowledge construction of this region of exploration to date.
Design/methodology/approach
The bibliometric investigation assesses 416 service failure articles in business associated research. Multidimensional scaling is used to uncover the scope of the scholarly impacts that have helped understand the nature of the service failure literature. The establishment of knowledge in the service failure literature is revealed by analysing co-citation data to identify significant topical impacts.
Findings
The theoretical model combines five areas with significant propositions for the future improvement of service failure as an area of investigation. The most important research themes in service failure literature are service failure, service failure communication, recovery process, recovery offer and intention.
Research limitations/implications
Potential research concentrating on the service failure literature could use search terms improved from the literature review, or use a comparable approach whereby a board of well-informed scholars approved the key words used.
Practical implications
This paper is beneficial for any reader who is interested in understanding the components of the perception of justice and recovery and how it improves repurchase intention.
Originality/value
The study seeks to influence resource and recovery-based concepts and utilises the five supporting knowledge groups to suggest a plan for future research that fills existing gaps and offers the possibility of expanding and enhancing the service failure literature.
Purpose
When service failure occurs, it leads to dissatisfaction, lack of trust and avoidance behaviour among customers, and it can also be seen as a threat to the survival of the business. This paper aims to investigate the current and potential dynamics of service failure research within the tourism and hospitality area.
Design/methodology/approach
By adopting qualitative, quantitative (citation and text mining) and science-mapping tools (descriptive, conceptual and intellectual), this study analyses 99 key papers on service failure in 18 major hospitality and tourism journals over a 20-year span.
Findings
The research on service recovery strategies, recovery efforts, pre- and post-failure and post-recovery in the service encounter and the impacts of justice on post-recovery and post-complaint behaviour are identified as the major streams of service failure research. While emotional labour, rumination and satisfaction recovery were identified as emerging themes, service failure perceptions and social media were found as the developed and substantial trends.
Practical implications
This study presents a comprehensive understanding of service failure research development in the hospitality and tourism industry. This study propose three areas – circumstantial cues, interactional cues and crisis management – that practitioners need to understand to minimise service failure during the service interaction.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior bibliometric study has investigated the current and future dynamics of service failure in the hospitality and tourism industry and offered a research agenda based on this gap in the literature.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.