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

The main objective of this study was to investigate how failure severity and brand reputation impact the variousdimensions of coping strategies. Specifically, we manipulated failure severity and brand reputation and examinedtheir main effects and interaction effect on coping strategies. Our findings indicate that coping strategies depend onboth failure severity and brand reputation. Further, the findings show that brand reputation moderate the impact offailure severity on the coping strategies used by the customers.Although service failure and recovery is an important aspect of customer relationship management (Tax et al.,1998), yet little theoretical research has addressed the impact of service failure severity on the coping strategiesemployed to reduce the stress associated with the failure. Further, the brand reputation plays an important role incustomer evaluation of service failures. To bridge this gap, the present study examined how brand reputation of thecompany moderates the impact of severity of the failure on the coping strategies. This study makes significanttheoretical contributions in understanding the various coping strategies employed by the customers‘ indifferentconditions of failure severity and brand reputation. As hypothesized, this study demonstrated that customers resort tomultiple coping strategies to reduce stress experienced during service failures of varying magnitude. Of the eightcoping strategies, it is observed that when customers experience service failures of high severity they engage inaction coping than rational thinking, positive thinking and avoidance. Action based coping was primarily employedin coping with the stress resulting from high severe failure condition. Further, coping strategies such as positivethinking, rational thinking and emotional venting were predominantly employed in low severe conditions.Main effect of severity on action based coping indicated that when the severity of the problem is high customers tendto voice their disgust to the company in anticipation of corrective measures or they themselves take up initiative tosolve the problem. However, low severe problems are better dealt with strategies which are directed towardsmanaging their own emotional state such as rational thinking and positive thinking. Since magnitude of the problemis low in this case customers get a better opportunity to delve into the source of the problem rather than takingaggressive action against the company. The findings also suggested greater use of avoidance and denial aspredominant strategies to cope with less severe failures. This is because customers often find these service failures tobe too insignificant to probe further.