Service failure research in the hospitality and tourism industry: a synopsis of past, present and future dynamics from 2001 to 2020

Purpose - When service failure occurs, it leads to dissatisfaction, lack of trust and avoidance behaviour among customers, and it can also be seen as a threat to the survival of the business. This paper investigates the current and potential dynamics of service failure research within the tourism and hospitality area. Design/methodology/approach - By adopting qualitative, quantitative (citation and text mining) and science-mapping tools (descriptive, conceptual, and intellectual), we analyse 99 key papers on service failure in 18 major hospitality and tourism journals over a 20-year span. Findings - The research on service recovery strategies, recovery efforts, pre-, and post-failure, and post-recovery in the service encounter, and the impacts of justice on post-recovery and post-complaint behaviour are identified as the major streams of service failure research. While emotional labour, rumination, and satisfaction recovery were identified as emerging themes, service failure perceptions and social media were found as the developed and substantial trends. Practical implications - We present a comprehensive understanding of service failure research development in the hospitality and tourism industry. We propose three areas – circumstantial cues, interactional cues, and crisis management – that practitioners need to understand in order to minimise service failure during the service interaction. Originality – To the best of our knowledge, no prior bibliometric study has investigated the current and future dynamics of service failure in the hospitality and tourism industry and offered a research agenda based on this gap in the literature

A bibliometric investigation of service failure literature and a research agenda

Purpose - This research studies the citations made in service failure literature, and assesses the knowledge construction of this region of exploration to date. Design/methodology/approach - The bibliometric investigation assesses 416 service failure articles in business associated research. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is employed to uncover the scope of the scholarly impacts that have helped understand the nature of the service failure literature. The establishment of knowledge in the service failure literature is revealed by analysing co-citation data to identify significant topical impacts. Findings - The theoretical model combines five areas with significant propositions for the future improvement of service failure as an area of investigation. The most important research themes in-service failure literature are service failure, service failure communication, the recovery process, recovery offer and intention. Research limitations/implications - Potential research concentrating on the service failure literature could use search terms improved from the literature review, or use a comparable approach whereby a board of well-informed scholars approved the keywords used. Practical implications - This paper is beneficial for any reader who is interested in understanding the components of the perception of justice and recovery and how it improves repurchase intention. Originality/value - The study seeks to influence resource and recovery-based concepts and utilises the five supporting knowledge groups to suggest a plan for future research that fills existing gaps and offers the possibility of expanding and enhancing the service failure literature

Individual Reactions To Organizational Ethical Failures And Recovery Attempts: A Recovery Paradox?

The vast majority of behavioral ethical research focuses on the antecedents of unethical behavior. Consequently, questions involving the consequences of organizational unethical behavior remain largely unanswered. Therefore, extant business ethics research largely neglects the impacts of organizational unethical behavior on individuals. Moreover, questions involving what organizations can do to correct or recover from having engaged in unethical behavior as well as individual responses to those efforts are also mostly ignored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of unethical activity on employees and explore organizations that have failed ethically and their attempts at recovery. This study explores two issues. First, how do employees react to organizational unethical behavior (OUB) and to what extent are those reactions dependent on contextual and individual factors? Second, to what extent can organizations recover from the negative impacts of ethical failure? More specifically, is it possible for organizations that fail in their ethical responsibilities to recover such that they are paradoxically better-off than their counterparts that never failed in the first place? To explore these issues I review, integrate and draw upon the ethical decision-making and service failure recovery literatures for theoretical support. Empirical testing included two studies. The first was a field study using survey data acquired from the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) in which over 29,000 participants were asked about their perceptions of ethics at work. Second, a supplemental field study was conducted in which 100 employees rated the characteristics of unethical acts (e.g. severity). Results revealed a negative direct effect of severity and controllability of the OUB on perceptions of organizational ethicality and a negative direct effect of controllability of the OUB on organizational satisfaction. Ethical context moderated the relationship between OUB controllability and perceived organizational ethicality. Partial support was found for the moderating effects of ethical context on the relationship between OUB severity and perceived organizational ethicality. Results also supported an ethical failure recovery paradox

Service encounters, experiences and the customer journey: defining the field and a call to expand our lens

Service researchers have emphasized the importance of studying the service experience, which encompasses multiple service encounters. Although the reflection on a series of service encounters has increased, the scope of research in this space remains narrow. Service research has traditionally concentrated on understanding, measuring and optimizing the core service delivery. While this focused lens has generated extraordinary knowledge and moved service research and practice forward, it has also resulted in a narrowly focused research field. The authors present a framework to guide comprehensive service experience research. Broadly, they define (1) pre-core service encounter, (2) core service encounter, and (3) post-core service encounter as distinct periods within a service experience. Further, they review the literature and put forward important research questions to be addressed within and across these periods. Finally, they argue that researchers need to consider simultaneously all periods of the service experience to make valuable contributions to the literature.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Customer perceptions of service failure, service recovery and loyalty recovery

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonBuilding sustainable customer relationships through effective service recovery is a worthwhile goal for all airline companies in an era of intense competition. Developing service recovery strategies that can strengthen customer loyalty in the event of service failure has become a major challenge for the airline business, but yet has received little attention from academics. To address the dearth in the literature, this study sets out to investigate how customers’ perceptions of perceived justice of service recovery and those factors external to the recovery encounter, including service failure attributions and company reputation, impact their loyalty recovery in the airline context. This study uses a quantitative method based on a surrey approach. A selfadministered questionnaire was purposively distributed among airline customers at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand. The study was tested using data collected from 480 travellers who had previously experienced a full service airline’s flight delay in the past 12 months and was analysed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). First, the results of this research confirm the robustness of the Expectation Disconfirmation Paradigm (EDP) for understanding customer perceived justice of service recovery in an exchange relationship context by emphasising significant positive effects of all dimensions of justice in restoring positive customer relationships. Second, the findings clarify the interrelationships between postrecovery customer trust, customer’s overall company satisfaction and customer loyalty by highlighting the important role of which trust plays in recovering customer loyalty. Third, The results further demonstrate how customer perceived justice of service recovery is contingent upon service failure attributions and company reputation. Lastly, the research provides airline managers with useful guidelines on developing cost-effective service recovery strategies focusing on maximising customer loyalty in different service failure situations

Attribution of Responsibility after Failures within Platform Ecosystems

Increasingly, new hardware and software are embedded within ecosystems that include a platform and modules. Ideally these ecosystems perform reliably. However, if an ambiguously sourced failure occurs within one of these ecosystems, users are left to distribute blame across the various components of the ecosystem. The actual distribution of this blame, however, can be difficult to predict. This study investigates attribution of blame and discontinuance recommendations for ecosystem components after an ambiguously sourced failure. To extend platform ecosystems and attribution theory, we conducted a scenario-based experiment investigating the negative consequences of failure for platform and module components and the contingent effects from design elements (border strength) and contextual factors (task goal directedness, disruption severity). Results demonstrated a diffusion of negative consequences for failure across ecosystem components, but ecosystem modules (apps) received the majority of the blame and highest discontinuance recommendations. High border strength shifted negative consequences for failure away from the OS to the device. Low goal-directedness resulted in users taking more of the blame for the failure, and higher disruption severity resulted in higher discontinuance recommendations for the OS and device. Importantly, the amount of blame attributed to one component in an ecosystem predicted discontinuance recommendations for other components

Webcare's effect on constructive and vindictive complainants

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate that online complainants' reactions to a company's service recovery attempts (webcare) can significantly vary across two different types of dissatisfied customers ("vindictives" vs "constructives"), who have dramatically diverging complaint Goal orientations. Design/methodology/Approach: Online multi-country survey among 812 adult consumers who recently had a dissatisfying brand experience and turned to a marketer-generated social media site to voice an online complaint for achieving their ultimate complaining goals. Scenario-based online experiment for cross-validating the survey findings. Findings: Results suggest that "vindictive complainants" - driven dominantly by brand-adverse motives - are immune to any form of webcare, while "constructive complainants" - interested in restoring the customer-brand relationship - react more sensitively. For the latter, "no-responses" often trigger detrimental brand-related reactions (e.g. unfavorable brand image), whereas "defensive Responses" are likely to stimulate postwebcare negative word-of-mouth. Research limitations/implications: This research identifies the gains and harms of (un-)desired webcare. By doing so, it not only sheds light on the circumstances when marketers have to fear negative effects (e.g. negative word-of-mouth) but also provides insights into the conditions when such effects are unlikely. While the findings of the cross-sectional survey are validated with an online experiment, findings should be interpreted with care as other complaining contexts should be further investigated. Practical implications: Marketers have to expect a serious "backfiring effect" from an unexpected source, namely, consumers who were initially benevolent toward the involved brand but who received an inappropriate response

The Role of Consumer Ethnocentrism on the Effects of Domestic vs Foreign Product Failure on Post Consumption Emotions and Complaint Behaviors

It is well acknowledged that consumer ethnocentrism has a negative effect on evaluations of foreign products, brand-related attitudes toward foreign brands, and purchase intentions of the non-local products. However, an investigation into the role of consumer ethnocentrism at the post-consumption stage had been neglected. Specifically, when a product fails for a consumer. The main purpose of this dissertation is to study the role of consumer ethnocentrism on the post purchase consumption emotions and complaint behaviors. This dissertation proposes that cognitive appraisals of antecedent events and individual social traits will lead to differentiated outcomes. Domestic products that are perceived to be from one’s own in-group will lead high ethnocentrism consumers to judge those products (in group) favorably compared to foreign products (out group). Therefore, when in-group members perform harmful actions, individuals may defend the negativity of the actions of the fellow group members and exhibit a high tolerance for their wrong doing. Two experimental studies in this dissertation provides evidence to support the proposition that highly ethnocentric consumers tend to lessen the importance of self-related failures but emphasize the failure of out-group members and punish the foreign products more severely than domestic products when the product fails. They showed higher level of negative emotions such as anger and regret for foreign product failures compared to domestic product failures. Similarly, they are more likely to engage in retaliatory behaviors such as negative word of mouth, switching, boycotting when foreign product fails. In contrast, in thecase of domestic product failure, high ethnocentrism consumers engage in more conciliator