Customers’ emotions in service failure and recovery: a meta-analysis

This service failure/recovery emotions’ synthesis showed: 1) Conceptual models of emotions affect the relationship between emotions and their correlates; 2) Perceived fairness is most important in triggering negative/positive emotions; 3) Recovery satisfaction and loyalty are stronger related to positive emotions; 4) Methodological characteristics explain systematic variation in the effect sizes

Free upgrades with costly consequences: can preferential treatment inflate customers’ entitlement and induce negative behaviors?

Purpose Companies often provide preferential treatment, such as free upgrades, to customers. The present study aims to identify a costly consequence of such preferential treatment (i.e. opportunistic behavior) and reveal which type of customer is most likely to engage in that negative behavior (i.e. new customers). Design/methodology/approach Across two experimental studies, the authors test whether preferential treatment increases customers’ entitlement, which in turn increases their propensity to behave opportunistically. Moderated mediation analysis further tests whether that mediated effect is moderated by customers’ prior relationship with the company. Findings Preferential treatment increases feelings of entitlement, which consequently triggers customers’ opportunistic behaviors. New customers are more likely to feel entitled after preferential treatment than repeat customers, and hence new customers are more likely to behave opportunistically. Preferential treatment also increases customers’ suspicion of the company’s motives, but suspicion was unrelated to opportunistic behavior. Research limitations/implications Future research may focus on other marketplace situations that trigger entitlement and explore whether multiple occurrences of preferential treatment provide different effects on consumers. Practical implications Present findings demonstrate that preferential treatment can evoke opportunistic behaviors among customers. The authors suggest that preferential treatment should be provided to customers who previously invested in their relationship with a company (i.e. repeat customers) rather than new customers. Originality/value Prior research has focused more on the ways companies prioritize their repeat customers than how they surprise their new customers. The present research instead examines preferential treatment based on customers’ relationship with a firm (i.e. both repeat and new customers) and demonstrates behavioral and contextual effects of entitlement

Reproduction of Human Resources and Attracting Youth to the Public Civil Service

The work resulted in recommendations on attracting young people to the civil service in order to reproduce the personnel potential of public administration, as well as to increase the attractiveness of the civil service in the labor market. For this, an analysis of the career preferences of young people, an analysis of the problems of staffing the civil service has been carried out

Getting emotional twice: an analysis of patterns of emotional states after failure and recovery

Service failure and recovery are powerful triggers of customer emotional reactions. However, research has overlooked the combined effect of emotions triggered by both service failure and service recovery on customers’ satisfaction with complaint handling (SATCOM) and with the company overall (OS). This study addresses this research gap through two studies. In study 1 we summarize theoretical and empirical findings of emotional reactions in the service failure and recovery episodes. In Study 2 we experimentally manipulate service failure and recovery attributes in two scenarios to trigger emotions and estimate a model of the effect of the emotions on customers’ satisfaction. Findings show that different patterns of emotions following both service failure and service recovery differently affects SATCOM and OS. The authors discuss theoretical and managerial importance of emotions in complaint handling research

Entitled to do good: how self-enhancement motivations shape behavior of those feeling 'special'

Previous studies have demonstrated that psychological entitlement adversely influences various areas of social behavior. Current research argues that entitlement can have not only negative, but also positive downstream consequences depending on the underlying motivations of those who perceive themselves as entitled. In a series of four studies, we demonstrate that entitled individuals, indeed, might behave prosocially. We specifically demonstrate that those who perceive themselves as entitled behave more prosocially when (1) they are given an opportunity to self-enhance versus when they are not given an opportunity to self-enhance, and (2) when the pro-social behavior is framed as serving to the pro-self (vs. pro-social) motivation. Moreover, we propose and demonstrate that one way to increase the pro-social behavior of those who feel entitled might be to conduct the pro-social behavior in public (vs. private) context

Entitled to deserve the best and unentitled to deserve the worst: customers’ perception of extreme service reviews depends on their sense of entitlement

No description supplie

Do I deserve it? Origins and consequences of consumer entitlement

The current research examines the role of entitlement, or an illegitimate sense of deservingness, in the marketplace. We focus on the antecedents of entitlement and describe a market situation that leads to an elevated sense of entitlement among a certain consumer group. We demonstrate that a sense of entitlement has negative consequences that extend beyond the original circumstances in which it was triggered. Specifically, we argue that when certain customers are afforded preferential treatment, leading to an elevated sense of entitlement, this gives rise to an opportunistic behavior. We also explore the effect of entitlement has on different consumers depending on their prior relationship, if any, with the company or business in question. We show that when preferential treatment is afforded "non-loyal" customers of a company, those customers experience an elevated sense of entitlement and are more likely to behave opportunistically than the same company's "loyal" customers are