The Impact Of Customer And Employee 's Emotion On The Attribution Of Service Responsibility

With the booming service industry, as well as the rise of science services, customer participation in service production process is no longer a new topic. Since services are intangible and experiential, service scholars and practitioners have already been aware of customers and service staffs are supposed to work together to cocreate service value. Scholars had been interested in customer psychological responses to participation. However, their study are confined to qualitative interpretation, there need more empirical and experimental research to explore the psycholotical implication. The scholars have drawn on the social psychological literature on the self-serving bias and conduct studies to examine the negative effects of participation on customer satisfaction, but they have not yet empirically investigate customer attribution to participation.Emotion is very important for interpersonal interaction, and it has been testified to play a crucial role in individual decision making process. Customer and employee emotion in the interaction process are decisive for service output, for example, in the context of customer participation in services, customers who are unhappy want to travel, have a cup of coffee, and go to beauty salon spa for recreation. Employees’ distinct emotional display will also differentially influence customers’service evaluations. This research attempts to explore how customer emotion and service employee’s emotion to influence customer perception of service outcome in customer participation.Human is irrational because it uses the rules of consisteney and invariability to evaluate people’s decision behaviors. Traditional psychology studies confirm the positive emotions and negative emotions have different effects on information processing, memory and learning, etc. But few studies in the past focused on the topic whether emotions with the same valence will differently affect cognitive processes. Attribution theory emphasizes different attribution will bring different emotional experience, but the impact of emotions on responsibility attribution in task cooperation has not been widely concerned.After the above analysis and theoretical literature review, we proposed our assumptions to be verified through the experimental design. A total of nine experiments: where Experiment1,2,3,4verify whether customer mood state will influence customer’s attribution of services; Experiment5,6,7discuss whether service employees’ emotional display will affect customer’s attribution of services, and how the need for cognition and need for affect of the customers will affects their understanding of employees’emotions; Experiment8,9discuss how their own emotional and others’ emotional display affect individuals’self-evaluation and judgment of others, the main conclusions are as follows:(1) Customer’s and service employee’s emotional states with the different valence will differently influence service attribution; and their different emotional state with the same valence would also have significantly different effect on customers’attribution of services;(2) Employees’emotional display could be used as a source for customers to make attribution of service outcome. Tt was found that the service staffs with real negative emotions are not necessarily worse than positive emotions; service staff could exhibit their own emotional experience. The experiments also found that need for cognition will not moderate the impact of employee’s emotional display on customer’s judgement, but need for affect will affect the extent how customers rely on employee’s emotional cues;(3) Incidental emotions will be concerned as the issue-irrelevant peripheral cues when customers make perception and judgment, and customer’s emotional state can affect self-appraisal of their own competence and warmth, while service employee’s emotional display can also affect customer’s appraisal about employees’competence and warmth.We also exploratorily study the importance of emotions in the service before the experiment through the qualitative research method, out-patient services in both emotional and results to determine the explanatory research, experimental study was supplemented show the experimental results of this study in the significance of the actual service life, and confirmed the experimental results in the real scene of revelation in service management, staff management and customer management。Finally, all results were summarized and analyzed, and the theoretical and empirical contributions to service management and social psychology are discussed, as well as limitations and future research directions.