Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

Coping With Service Failure: The moderating Role Of Brand ReputationFailures in service delivery are inevitable and recovering such service encounters represent a significant challengefor service firms. When failures occur, customers experience negative emotions as the service provider does notmeet the expectations and as a result, they feel dissatisfied. Research findings have confirmed that customersmaintain different levels of expectations of service performance with regard to reputed versus lesser known firms(Palmar, Beggs and Keown-McMullan,2000; Roggeveen, Bharadwaj and Hoyer, 2007; Hess, 2008; Huang, 2011).For reputable brands, customers have high expectations of service performance and view them as having serviceprocedures that deliver quality services. Further, given the high uncertainty from service intangibility, brandreputation acts a signal about the service performance and allows customers to anticipate more accurately the servicedelivery process (Weigelt and Camerer, 1988; Selnes, 1993). Thus, brand reputation may affect the evaluation ofservice failure as customers‘ expectation of service performance is influenced by the repute of the service brand. Insuch instances, how customers cope with the service failure is an important managerial issue as coping affectscustomers‘ post-failure attitudes and behaviors. According to the appraisal theory, individuals often use copingstrategies to reduce negative emotions from stressful encounters (Lazarus, 1991; Gelbrich, 2010). Surprisingly, littleresearch has focused on the coping strategies customers‘ engage in, to manage stress from service failure.Coping is the private internalization process by which customers attempt to manage negative experiences such asservice failures (Gabbott et al. 2011). Researchers in Psychology have indicated a typology of coping strategiesindividuals‘ employ to manage stressful situations (Folkman and Lazarus, 1980; Carver et al. 1989; Yi andBaumgartner, 2004). In case of service failures, customers appraise the service encounters through copingmechanism and evaluate the extent to which the situation is changeable and attributed to self or anotherparty(Gabbott et al. 2011). Thus, appraisal of the stressful events influences the coping strategies used by thecustomers. As service failures of different magnitude and repute involves distinct appraisal of the event, they arelikely to be associated with different coping strategies to manage the situation. However, there is little systematicresearch on the relationship between service failure, brand reputation, coping and satisfaction. This study will