Research On The Influence Of Customer Anger On Frontline Employees' Service Recovery In Service Encounters

When service failures occur,the high power endowed by the "customer is the king" philosophy makes it easy for customers to vent anger on frontline employees.To avoid the damage on organizational performance caused by customer anger,service firms usually require frontline employees to promptly and opportunely recover,in hope of dispelling customers' negative emotions.Although emphasizing employees' should-do is important,it is more necessary to figure out their would-do in advance.The reason behind is that frontline employees are primary contact points and also the critical actors for service recovery,and clarifying their immediate responses to customer anger can help open the black box of interpersonal service interactions,improve crisis management,and take care of employees' mental health and well-being as well.However,the existing literature has not reached a consensus on whether customer anger in service encounters shows a negative or positive effect on employees,thereby failing to provide solid theoretical support for the above-mentioned issue.In fact,contradictory findings may result from the limitations of existing research.Firstly,most literature at this stage considers customer anger as an integral construct,lacking a fine-grained investigation on its different expressive characteristics from the perspective of frontline employees' perceptions.Second,when it comes to mechanisms underlying the relationship between customer anger and employees' service work,the current theoretical perspectives are fragmented and an integrative framework with more explanatory power is particularly needed.Therefore,a series of research questions are worthy of further investigation: how do different employees' perpecptions of customer anger affect their immediate behaviors in service encounters? What is the integrative mechanism underlying above relationships?Are there any differences between the effects of different perceptions? How do organizational situation-based characteristics impact on above processes?Situated in service failure and recovery encounters,this research grounds on emotion as social information theory to examine the relationship between customer anger and frontline employees' service recovery,as well as the mechanisms underling.Specifically,this paper focuses on the process of which different perceptions of customer anger-the intensity and the relevance with employees impact on frontline employees' emotional,cognitive and subsequent recovery responses.Furthermore,the moderating effect of companies' service climate is discussed.In this paper,survey and scenario-based experiments combine to empirically test the framework and hypotheses.Questionnaires were employed to survey frontline employees in the tourism industry,at the aim of getting a glimpse at the real service interactions.Specifically,363 valid samples were obtained and software such as SPSS 23.0 and Mplus 8.3 were used to analyze the data.As the result,the predicted relationships were confirmed preliminarily.In the part of experiments,the research includes four scenario-based studies referring to the service interactions in hotel contexts and further confirms the causality of hypothesized relationships.Different manipulation materials were used for the customer anger.Specifically,Study 1 examined the intensity of customer anger(high vs.low)on the emotional and cognitive responses of employees.Study 2used text material to analyze the effect of relevance with employees of customer anger(high vs.low)on the emotional and cognitive responses of employees.Study3 involved a between-subject design of 2(intensity: high vs.low)×2(relevance with employee: high vs.low)by means of audio recordings,and attempted to test the interactive effects of different perceptions on employees' emotional and cognitive responses.Study 4 continued with the audio stimulus and 2(intensity:high vs.low)×2(relevance with employees: high vs.low),showing that the emotional and cognitive responses of employees mediated the relationship between customer anger and service recovery.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows.Firstly,the results show that different perceptions of customer anger have differential impacts on frontline employees' immediate service recovery.Intensity increases employees' anger and further damages recovery,and meanwhile intenstiy increases employees' perceived threat and further facilitate recovery.The above processes cancle each other out and finanally the link between intenstiy and recovery shows positive.Relevance inhibits the anger infection of employees and increases their perceived threat as well,both of which improve service recovery.The interaction of intenstiy and relevance produces four combinations of customer anger,and the combination of high intensity and high relevance brings the highest level of employee perceived threat and the best service recovery.Secondly,this study reveals that employees' anger and perceived threat are multiple mediators in the relationship between customer anger and service recovery.The employees' perceived threat also mediates the interactive effects of intensity and relevance on service recovery.Thirdly,the findings show that service climate not only moderates the relationship between customer anger and employees' emotional and cognitive responses,but also moderates the mediating effects between customer anger and service recovery,namely the moderated mediation.This research has three contributions.Firstly,we conceptualize customer anger based on the perceptions of frontline employee,and further examine the differential effects of two kinds of perceptions on employees' emotional,cognitive and behavioral responses.By doing so,this study enriches the existing analytical perspectives of the research on the interpersonal effects of customer anger,and clarifies the contradictory conclusions.Secondly,by combining the two psychological processes of employees' emotion and cognition,this research analyzes the transmission mechanism from customer anger to employees' service recovery,which develops an integrative theoretical framework.Our study suggests that an integrative framework can effectively avoid conclusion bias and contribute to a comprehensive evaluation of interpersonal effects of customer anger.Thirdly,it is found that the moderator of service climate shows a double-edged effect,which is conducive to deepening the contextual investigation on the interpersonal influence of customer anger,meanwhile complementing the theoretical research on service climate.This study is also of great practical value.Specifically,service firms can utilize our findings to understand customer anger and predict and control frontline employees' service recovery work.The findings can also help managers clarify the role of service climate on frontline employees' performance,especially in service failure and recovery encounters,thereby providing insights for the scientific construction and evaluation on the internal organizational environment.Although the research sheds lights on the existing literature,there are still some limitations worthy of the further exploration.In terms of research methods,future scholars can use the matching data of customers and employees to verify our findings.Moreover,the video stimulus,face-to-face interactions or field study can be used.As for the research content,following researchers can try to establish an overarching framework that integrates affective,cognitive and resource-based accounts.Moreover,the moderating effect of interpersonal factors can be explored in the future research.In addition,investigating the dynamic and dyadic interaction and even extending beyond the dyadic interactions between the target customer and front-line employee may become the extremely valuable directions.