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

evoked by the incident (Strizhakova et al., 2012).Thus it can be predicted that b the choice of coping strategieswould depend on customers the level of anger induced due to the varied degrees of failure. Based on the aboveliterature, we proposed that when customers evaluate the problem to be of high severe, they will use strategies suchas action coping and instrumental support to reduce the stress associated with the problem. On the contrary, if theproblem is perceived to be less severe i.e. when the potential harm is low, customers would rely on strategies such asrational thinking, positive thinking, emotional venting, emotional support, denial and avoidance. Hence wehypothesize:Hypothesis H 1 : Service failure severity directly impacts coping strategies such that for more severe failurescustomer employ more of action coping and social support for instrumental reasons and for less severeproblems they use more of rational thinking, positive thinking, emotional venting, social support for emotionalreasons, avoidance and denial.Moderating effect of brand reputationService failures lead to detrimental consequences for organizations in the form of dissatisfaction, (Bitner, 1990; Hesset al., 2003) resulting in complaint intentions (Folkes, 1984; Singh, 1990; Gregoire et al., 2009), and exit orswitching behavior (Keaveney, 1995). Customers have different expectation for recovering failures from the firmsdepending on their reputation. Uncertainty management theory (Lind and Vandeboss, 2002) suggest that justiceperceptions gains prominence when level of uncertainty is more in the environment. Under uncertain environmentalcondition, individuals are more apprehensive about their ability to control the surroundings. The sense of uncertaintystems from the lack of trustworthiness of the authority of which they have no prior experience. ―Consequently, in thepresence of uncertainty, people tend to react very positively towards authorities who uphold fairness norms andprinciples and very negatively towards authorities who violate those norms and principles”, (Tangirala and Alge,2006, p.2).However, in the perspective of literature on brand reputation, a highly reputed brand is an indicant of thetrustworthiness of the service provider. Customers expect better quality of service from firm with high reputationand therefore are displeased on experiencing a service failure (Zeithamal et al., 1993; Oliver, 1997; Niedrich et al.,2005). However, studies by Keh and Lee (2006) argued that an enhanced brand reputation shields the company from