Effects Of Customer Preceived Justice On Service Recovery Performance:Roles Of Face Awareness And Benevolence

How to attract and retain customers has become the key issue for service enterprises. However, service failure is somehow unavoidable because service as a unique product is intangible, perishable and isochronous. As a result, effective service recovery is proved to be an important tool to restore customer confidence. Service recovery has drawn wide attention and recovery efforts have been divided into two dimensions by researchers, which are outcome recovery and process recovery. As customers play the key role to evalutate the effectiveness of recovery strategies, it is very important to understand how customers perceive and evalutate various recovery strategies.The consumption process is also a process of social exchange and psychological perception. Customers will get pleasure and social recognition from consumption process as well.Chinese customers pay lots of attention on face awareness due to the long term cultivation of traditional culture. However, service failure cause the perception of losing face and recovery strategies should be accordingly designed to create the perception of gaining face. On the other hand, Chinese customers are influenced by the core values of Confucianism which are represented by "Ren"and Forgiveness.Those value system definitely influence the way that Chinese customers deal with conflicts.From the above perspectives, we introduce Face Awareness and Benevolence into theoretical model.Based on TRA Theory, Attitutde Theory and Equity Theory, this dissertation build a complete influencing mechanism of Perceived Justice on service recovery effectiveness based on evidence of economy hotels.This dissertation mainly solved the below issues which include through what paths Perceived Justice can has the on recovery effectiveness and the role of Face Awareness, Benenlence and emotions in the influencing mechanism.Besides,the factors that can cause post-recovery behavior intentions were studied as well. We conducted a preliminary exploration research before the formal study. The preliminary research contained two rounds of interviews and one round of survey.The forms of existence and features of face awareness, benenlence and emotions in recovery were found. In addition, the most common service failure circumstances and recovery strategies were discussed as well. To thoroughly observe effects of perceived justice, face awareness and Benenlence on service recovery in formal study, we designed a complex experitment which contained 48 experimental units.Each unit contained a different failure circumstance and a recovery strategy. Each participant was required to randomely join a unit and completed the survey on Face Awareness, Benenlence, emotions, recovery satisfaction and post behavior intention. The formal study lasted 5 months and invited more than 800 participants who work in big enterprises, government departmetns and public institutions to join the experiment. Finally, we obtained 764 effective surveys.The main conclusions from this study were obtained by mathematical statistics. Firstly, the distributive justice and interactive justice have positive effects on face awareness and benevolence while the effect of procedure justice is not positive.Secondly, the influencing paths of face awareness and benevolence are different. Benevolence can has both direct and indirect effects on recovey satisfaction. Face awareness can not exert direct effects on recovey satisfaction which means emotions play as a mediating role in it. Thirdly, recovery satisfaction plays as a mediating role in recovery emotions and post-recovery behavior intentions. Recovery satisfaction is the most important factor that causes post-recovery behavior intentions. Fourthly, face consciousness moderates relationship of interactive justice and face awareness and forgiveness tendency moderates the relationship of procedural justice and benevolence and the relationship of interactive justice and benevolence. In addition, interactive justice plays a larger role in influencing face awareness and benevolence. This finding shows the importance of interpersonal interaction in recovery process. From anova analysis, we further finds that high quality process recovery such as managerial intervention can effectively improve face aware and benevolence especially when the failure circumstances involve impoliteness and personennel indifference.The main innovation of this dissertation is as the following. Firstly, new research paths were proposed. The face awareness and benevolence were introduced into theoretical models to explain the effects of perceived justice on recovey effects. Secondly, the newly designed questionnaires of face awareness and benevolence in previous research was fully tested by the criterion of reliability and validity.Thirdly, the preliminary research built a solid foundation for further investigation on face awareness and benevolence and provided empirical support for the scenario designs of formal experiment. Fourthly, the complex and systematical experiment design guaranteed the comprehensive observation of fluctuations of cognitive and emotional factors in service recovery process. Finally, based on the findings and conclusions from this dissertation, the suggestion with respect to how to exert recovery strategies according to customer characteristics and personal traits are put forward.