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

Prior studies have extensively studied the role of service failure in influencing customer attitude and behavioraloutcomes (Parasuraman et al., 1991; Mattila 2004; Bodey and Grace 2006; Grégoire et al., 2009). However, theprocess by which customers cope with service failures has not been studied exclusively. In the context of servicefailure, coping strategies are heavily influenced by the perception about the severity of service failure (Blodgett etal., 1997; Tax et al.,, 1998). Although prior literature suggests that service failures can be determined by its severity,frequency and timing, this study specifically focuses on the severity of service failures. According to Smith et al(1999) failure severity measures the magnitude of loss experienced by the customers. It is an important situationalfactor that determines the formation of post-failure attitudes. The study by Mattila (2004) on the negative effects ofservice failure reported that customers feel let down in case of service failures, thus resulting in sharp decrease intheir post-failure attitudes and loyalty. This indicates that for more severe problems, customers may perceive greaterloss which affects their post-failure attitude towards the product. Similarly, Swanson and Hsu (2009) showed thatfailure magnitude influences individual‘s subsequent attitudes, emotions and behaviours. Since, service failures ofdifferent magnitudes result in varying levels of stress, we argued that customer coping strategies would vary acrossthe levels of failure severity.In the purview of psychology literature, Jorm et al., (2004) argued that under a stressful condition individuals wouldoften initiate actions to reduce their stress. These actions would range from taking appropriate steps to mitigate thestress, seeking for social help or intensifying the everyday work to avoid the stress, depending on the level ofseverity associated with the stress. However, there are studies in organizational behaviour literature that argue socialsupport to be a less prevalent mechanism of coping when individuals need to make a decision with higher precision(Dalal and Bonaccio, 2010). Other studies in the organizational perspective indicate the importance of socialcommunities where people turn to each other in order to cope with the stress (Korczynski, 2003). In the marketingliterature, studies on choice of complaint channels revealed that consumers who want to even out with the marketer,predominantly prefer interactive channels than remote channels for making complaints. This indicates that a face toface interaction help the customers to cope better with the stress caused by the service failure (Mattila and Wirtz,2004). Further, the influence various coping strategies (expressive, active and denial) have on the behaviouralintentions of the customers is found to be dependent on the level of anger elicited by the incident and the thoughts