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

As postulated in the hypotheses H 2a through H 2h , we found that the reputation of the company interacted with theseverity conditions to impact some of the coping strategies. The results demonstrated that although action copingstrategy was used predominantly in high severe condition, brand reputation of the company interacted with the lesssevere failure condition too, to enhance the use of action coping strategy supporting H 2a. Customers‘ propensity touse action based coping strategy in less severe failure condition was found to be high when the brand reputation ishigh rather than when brand reputation is average. Since customers have high expectation of service quality from ahighly reputed company, even a slightest failure will lower the perceived quality of the service to a great extentresulting in high expectancy disconfirmation among customers (Cronin and Taylor, 1994). Hence these customerswill prefer to solve the problem by taking proper action to lessen the stress caused by the failure.The observation that high severe failure of highly reputed brands would result in less of action coping compared toaverage reputation is because customers expect highly reputed company to have proper recovery process in placeand anticipate the company to be competent enough to solve the problem. Whereas, for an averagely reputedcompany, customers feel that the concerned company may not have the required resources or infrastructure to solvethe problem. This drives the customers to take up more action based coping strategies such as finding ways to solvethe problem by themselvesThe hypotheses H 2c through H 2h predicted that interaction effect between severity and brand reputation would lead toadoption of coping strategies directed towards managing emotions, a phenomenon that was found to be pronouncedamong customers of average reputation company when severity of the failure was high. Thus, although rationalthinking in, absence of brand reputation was found to be a preferred way to cope with less severe failures, inpresence of brand reputation it was a preferable way of coping with high severe failures as well. The role of brandreputation in evaluating the effect of high severe failure on rational thinking indicated that this strategy was used lesswhen customers experience a high severe failure with a highly reputed company compared to customers of anaveragely reputed company. High expectancy disconfirmation, Cronin and Taylor (1994) is case of highly reputedcompanies does not allow the customers to justify the failure magnitude with any potential explanation. But foraveragely reputed companies, even if the failure severity is high, customers discount the experience more easily byassessing the failure situation more realistically. In such cases, a lowered expectation from the company helps the