The Relationship Among Cultural Distance, Customer Perceived Conflict And Service Performance

As an essential part of service production and service management, service encounter is the interaction between customers and service providers. Not only the interactions with the staff, but all contacts with different elements of the service are also part of the service encounter:physical facilities, service systems and other customers. Culture is generally accepted as being one of the underlying determinants of the expectation, perception and behavior of customers. Customers from different cultures form different perceptions and assessments of service encounters, and have different responses. Compared with other service industry, hotels provide more complex consumption experience for consumers. Hotel service requires a high degree of customer contact with service personnel and facilities. On the other hand, having a wide range of customers from various countries, hotels are places where different cultures collide with and merge into one another. The complexity of hotel services and the cultural diversity of hotel customers make the impact of culture on the service encounter and service performance more observable and uncertain in hotels. Therefore, the hotel should fully understand and identify the cultural factors of service encounters, and explores the mechanism of the effect of the cultural differences between the customer and the service provider on service performance. This will help the hotel establish service facilities and service procedure more properly according to the cultural characters of customers, and implement effective customer management, and finally enhance service quality and service performance.Following the logic that "cultural distance influencing perceived conflict and service performance" and based on conflict theory, social exchange theory, attribution theory, means-end theory and social identity theory, from the perspective of hotels’ foreign guests, this paper focuses on cultural conflict of service encounters, and analyzes the mechanism of the effect of cultural differences on service perception, service assessment and behavior of customers. This study uses research methods including literature review, interviews and questionnaire survey, and the statistical analysis methods of this study are content analysis, factor analysis and structure equation modeling and so on.The specific research process and conclusions are as follows:Firstly, based on the literature about the cultural-bound customer perception and the source of conflict, as well as the result of content analysis, this paper proposes new construct--customer perceived conflict, and further explores its denotation. Through the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, this paper confirms that perceived conflict is composed of service process conflict and service outcome conflict. A service process conflict means the perceived cultural conflict of personal interaction in service delivery; whereas a service outcome conflict means the perceived cultural conflict from service physical facilities and products. Moreover, this study proves that service process conflict comprises the personal conflict between customers and service providers (such as communication, responsibility and privacy) and the personal conflict with other guests of the hotel, service outcome conflict comprises the conflict from service ambient and the conflict from tangible facilities and products.Secondly, this study investigates the direct effects of cultural distance on customer complaint, customer identification and perceived value, and the mediate effects of perceived conflict among their relationships. Using the structural equation modeling, this paper compares different models. From the model which has the best fitness, this paper confirms that perceived cultural distance has a strong negative impact on customer identification directly, and perceived cultural distance produces a weak effect on perceived value. Moreover, this paper confirms that perceived cultural distance has a direct impact on customer complaint, and it also has an indirect effect mediated by perceived conflict. The more cultural distance foreign guests perceive the more degree of western cultural feature of customer complaint, such as the higher intention of voice response and the lower intention of private response. Perceived cultural distance has an indirect positive impact on customer complaint mediated by responsibility conflict, privacy conflict, other guests’interference conflict and service ambient conflict.Furthermore, the author identifies the travel purpose of guests (sightseeing, holiday and business), hotel price (low and high), and the cultural context of hotel brand (domestic brand and international brand) as control variables of this research, and examines the diversity of the mechanism of the effect of cultural difference on perceived conflict and service performance among different types of customers. Through the structural equation modeling, the study confirms that under different situations of travel purpose (sightseeing, holiday and business) or different hotel price (low and high), or different cultural context of hotel brand (domestic brand and international brand), the impact patterns of perceived cultural distance on perceived conflict and service performance have varied. For example, for hotel guests in their holidays, perceived cultural distance has a positive impact on service process conflict (communication, responsibility, privacy and other guests’ interference) and service outcome conflict (ambient, facilities and tangible products). For hotel guests with business or conference purpose, perceived conflict is significantly related to customer complaint (positively) and perceived value (negatively). Compared with low price hotels, guests in high price hotels have stronger request for privacy, and their perceived conflict from communication, ambient, facilities and tangible products would reduce their perceived value.Finally, this paper tests the moderating roles of cultural awareness and cross-cultural adjustment respectively. Using the structural equation modeling, the study validates that cultural awareness plays an interference effect on the link between perceived cultural distance and perceived conflict, and cross-cultural adjustment plays an interference effect on the link between perceived cultural distance and perceived conflict too.To sum up, the proposition and verification of customer perceived conflict construct lay a foundation for further analysis about the research of customer service perception and customer behavior under cross-cultural context, and also make it possible to explore the interaction between customers and service providers and interaction performance of cross-cultural service encounters. Through uncovering the latent influence mechanism of cultural distance, perceived conflict and customer complaint, customer identification and perceived value, this paper explores the research area of customer complaint, customer identification and perceived value in cross-cultural context, and provides theoretical and practical guidance for management of hotels and other service companies.