Customer Reactions to Fellow Customer Misbehavior

Abstract

The paper explores the structure and content of customers' reactions to fellow customer misbehavior following the scale development technology based on open-ended questionnaires. Two formal data investigations are taken after pre-test in Shenyang, with the sample of 203 and 413 consumers for exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis respectively. The results show that: (1) the structure of customers' reactions to fellow customer misbehavior consists of 9 dimensions named as dissuasion, understanding, approval, exit, retaliation, creative suggestion, sympathy for employees, venting and complaints, a total of 26 items; the scale developed has acceptable levels of reliability and validity, which could be the measurement tool for further research; (2) customers are more probable to exit the service enterprises while less possible to retaliate due to fellow customer misbehavior, and some positive reactions also exist with low possibility; (3) differences of customers' reactions to fellow customer misbehavior are statistically significant on demographic variables.

Customer aggression, emotional dissonance and employees' well‐being

“…While in most cases, the expression of positive emotion to customers is a spontaneous process that does not require investment of effort because employees genuinely experience the emotions they are required to display (Diefendorff et al, 2005;Tschan et al, 2005;Zapf et al, 1999), anger-provoking events clearly demand effort and control, and usually result in expressing emotions that are in conflict with truly felt emotions (Grandey et al, 2007;Totterdell and Holman, 2003;Tschan et al, 2005). This experience, known as emotional dissonance, IJQSS 3,3 is regarded as the core component of emotional labor and one of the reasons that it is, in fact, "labor" (Hochschild, 1983;Morris and Feldman, 1996).…”