The effect of complete versus partial observations on service evaluations

Abbasi, Marjan

doi:10.1108/ejm-12-2017-0965

Cited by 3 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…A rich literature in marketing has examined consumers' reactions to service failure (Sharifi et al, 2017;Sharifi and Spassova, 2020) and how individuals attribute blame for negative events (Abbasi, 2020;Palmeira et al, 2015). While some research has examined minority consumers (Baker et al, 2008), to the best of the authors' knowledge, no research has examined how being part of a minority influences evaluations of service failure.…”

Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minority group favoritism in service encounters

Palmeira

Sharifi²

2020

EJM

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Purpose This paper aims to investigate consumer reactions to minority retail employees. The paper argues that despite the persistence of racism and homophobia in society, the vast majority of the population is strongly against these forms of discrimination. Because of the profound negativity of such behavior, the study hypothesizes that consumers will be motivated to see themselves unequivocally as individuals free of prejudice. As a result, rather than treating all people equally, the study proposes that consumers will overcompensate and exhibit favoritism toward a retail employee when the latter is a member of a minority group. Design/methodology/approach This study presents ten studies in which participants evaluated employees who were a member of a minority or majority group. Studies 1a–1d use sexual orientation to contrast reactions to majority or minority bank managers in four countries (USÀ, Germany, Italy and South Korea), whereas Studies 1e and 1f use ethnicity (White vs Black) to examine the same question (UK and Canada). Study 1g offers a single-paper meta-analysis, testing the robustness of the observed effect. Studies 2 and 3 examine the roles of political ideology and its associated values, and Study 4 examines choice of an advisor in an online, but consequential setting. Findings Across several contexts and countries, the study finds a consistent pro-minority bias in evaluations of service employees. The study show that, in the USA, this bias is prevalent among liberals, but not among conservatives. This difference in the impact of political ideology is explained by adherence to traditionalism. Research limitations/implications This paper investigates consumer reactions to gays and Blacks and do not test for consumer reactions to other minority groups. Regarding employees’ sexual orientation, the findings of this study are limited to gay men only. Practical implications To elicit favorable evaluations from customers, managers may consider the match between employees’ sexual orientation or ethnicity and consumers’ liberal beliefs. In particular, managers may want to hire people from those minority groups in areas known for their liberal values. On the other hand, the findings suggest that managers should not worry about their new recruits’ sexual orientation and ethnicity in conservative areas, because the results suggest that conservatives show no favoritism toward employees in response to their group status. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first paper in marketing investigating consumer reactions to employees who belong to minority groups. The study reports a pro-minority bias that holds across samples and countries, thereby attesting to the population validity of the hypotheses. Further, the study identifies boundary conditions of the effect of employees’ group status by identifying managerially relevant moderators (i.e. political ideology and traditionalism).

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Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minority group favoritism in service encounters

Palmeira

Sharifi²

2020

EJM

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“… Chen (2018) also argued some mixed findings on the correlation between customer participation and the causal attribution of a particular service failure. Furthermore, several prior research efforts also showed that future studies could expand the type of failure attribution such as controllability ( Dong et al, 2008 , Roggeveen et al, 2012 , Abbasi, 2020 ). In addition, there has been a call to extend the research focus on the airline industry ( Zhang and Shao, 2018 , Abbasi, 2020 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on airline passengers’ recovery satisfaction: An experimental study

Istijanto¹

2021

Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

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The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every country in the world and affected numerous industries. Many businesses stopped or restricted their operations, resulting in service failures. This study aims to investigate the effect of customer participation and service failure on customer recovery satisfaction in the airline industry. The research employed a scenario-based experiment with 180 respondents as the samples. Convenience sampling was adopted. The responses of customer recovery satisfaction were measured on a 7-point Likert scale. Exploratory factor analysis was then used to validate the measurement and a general linear model was carried out to examine the impacts of customer participation and service failure on customer recovery satisfaction. The results showed that when the failure was due to the COVID-19, the highest customer satisfaction occurred when customers jointly participated in service recovery. This study also revealed that increasing customer participation during the service failure due to pilots on strike resulted in decreased customer recovery satisfaction. The current study contributes to the existing literature related to customer participation in service recovery. This research also provides a practical contribution for service managers when designing the level of customer participation in service recovery.

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“…From a business perspective, observing customers usually outnumber the focal customers. Moreover, service incivility from the viewpoint of observers has negative implications for the firm's performance and its competitive advantage (Abbasi, 2020; Mattila et al, 2014). This is particularly more challenging, yet under‐researched, in the context of intercultural service encounters (Argo & Dahl, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nonetheless, ethnically distant individuals are likely to pay different levels of attention to contextual and social factors in an intercultural social exchange (Johnson & Grier, 2013). To this extent, we study two relevant triggers of the stress–engagement mechanism, namely availability of information about the service incivility (Abbasi, 2020) and ethnic similarity, which is the observing customer's perceived congruence of ethnic backgrounds to the focal employee (Wan et al, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To extend the knowledge on the role of ethnicity in the stress–engagement relationship, this study compares black and white observers, given that the black ethnic group is the biggest minority group in the United Kingdom (Statista, 2022). Therefore, this paper responds to several research calls by investigating manager‐to‐employee incivility through the lenses of the observing customer (Karabas et al, 2019) in an intercultural context (Argo & Dahl, 2020), while considering the amount of available information (i.e., full vs. partial observation) about the witnessed incident (Abbasi, 2020). It also empirically extends current customer stress literature (Arvan et al, 2019; Roy & Jain, 2020) and customer engagement conceptual literature (Clark et al, 2020) from the focus on the focal customers to observing customers' stress and subsequent engagement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Observing customer stress and engagement: An intercultural perspective

Temerak

Zhang

Lages

2023

Psychology and Marketing

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Since observing customers outnumber focal customers in most service interactions, service managers aim to engage them despite triggers, such as service incivility. This research contributes to the understanding of the role of stress in observing customers' engagement (CE). It answers two RQs: (1) What is the relationship between their stress and engagement?; (2) What are the triggers of stress? Since ethnically different people pay different levels of attention to contextual and social factors, two sequential scenariobased experiments are adopted to study two triggers of stress (i.e., availability of information about an incivility incident, and ethnic similarity between the observing customer and the mistreated employee), which impacts CE in an intercultural service encounter. Study 1 compares being exposed to full versus partial information and demonstrates that full information about the incivility incident increases observers' psychological stress, which reduces their behavioral and emotional engagement. Study 2 compares how white and black observers react to ethnic similarity between the observing customer and the mistreated employee. Results show that incivility triggers outward psychological stress in white and black observers. In turn, black observers' outward stress reduces their behavioral engagement, while white observers' behavioral engagement is reduced by both their inward and outward stress.

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The effect of complete versus partial observations on service evaluations

Cited by 3 publications

References 42 publications

Minority group favoritism in service encounters

Minority group favoritism in service encounters

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on airline passengers’ recovery satisfaction: An experimental study

Observing customer stress and engagement: An intercultural perspective

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