Multiple emotional contagions in service encounters

Abstract

This paper investigates the dynamic impact of multiple sequential emotional displays by employees on customers' negative emotions. Using video-based stimuli to manipulate emotional displays by employees, this study shows the sequential occurrences of negative and positive emotional contagions in service failure and recovery encounters. The results suggest that higher levels of employees' negative emotional displays lead to a greater increase in customers' negative emotions through the process of negative emotional contagion during service failure. More importantly, we find that positive emotional displays by employees can decrease customers' negative emotions through the process of positive emotional contagion during service recovery, i.e., higher levels of employee positive emotional displays lead to a greater decrease in customers' negative emotions. In addition, no matter whether customers experience higher or lower levels of employee positive emotional displays during service recovery, their final negative emotions cannot fully return to their emotional levels prior to service failure. However, for customers experiencing higher levels of employee positive emotional displays, their final negative emotions can be greatly mitigated and are closer to their initial emotional levels, as compared to customers experiencing lower levels of employee positive emotional displays. The results further indicate that susceptibility to emotional contagion increases the effect of employees' negative (positive) emotional displays on customers' negative emotions during service failure (recovery). The findings of this study suggest that service firms should provide effective training to their frontline service employees so that they can display proper positive emotions during service encounters.

Creative participation: Collective sentiment in online co-creation communities

“…Rather, they can influence those who have direct contact with them, i.e., users who participate in the same discussion threads with employees and/or receive direct responses from employees. In line with prior research [23,37], we propose that positive user sentiment may be enhanced by positive employee sentiment and reduced by negative employee sentiment. Similarly, positive employee sentiment can decrease negative user sentiments, whereas negative employee sentiment can increase them.…”

“…Prior research in offline contexts has extensively studied how managers and team leaders can regulate their affective displays to influence the affective states of receivers. For example, in the service environment, Du, Fan, and Feng [23] found that positive emotional displays by employees increased the number of positive emotional displays by customers, as well as reduced their negative emotional displays. Employees operating on the internet (whether considered managers or moderators of the community) have direct contact with online users.…”

The relationship between consumer shopping stress and purchase abandonment in task-oriented and recreation-oriented consumers

“…This measure includes two items to assess task orientation (α = .90) and another two items to capture recreational orientation (α = .80). Finally, the respondents indicated whether salespersons were present or not, assessed the perceived realism of the described scenarios with two items (α = .72) taken from Du et al (2011), and provided their age and gender before completing an open-ended suspicion probe question.…”

“…Realism evaluation (Du et al 2011) .72 I think there are similar shopping situations in everyday life.…”

A disztributív igazságosság fogalmának értelmezése a szolgáltatóvállalat nézőpontjából

“…Az érzelemát-vitel azt fejezi ki, hogy az emberek hajlamosak egymás érzelmi állapotait visszatükrözni, anélkül, hogy ez tudatosulna bennük (Hatfield et al, 1994). Az érzelemát-vitelt több empirikus kutatásban is igazolták (Bailey et al, 2001;Pugh, 2001;Du et al, 2011). Az eredmények azt mutatják, hogy az alkalmazottak pozitív érzelmi megnyilvánulása befolyásolja a fogyasztók érzelmeit, és végső soron kihat a szolgáltatással való elégedettsé-gükre.…”