Abstract:

Usually, customer interacts with different frontline employees across encounters with a service organization; this situation is defined as a service pseudo relationship. Under the circumstance, the characteristic of service heterogeneity could be more significant due to the increasing service encounter, so that service failure shows more common and the attributions and evaluations toward thus failure would be more complicated. Based on this, the present study attempts to investigates consumers’ attributions and judgments on offending employee and service organization base on their implicit theories of personality when face to a interactional service failures within pseudo relationships. By using express chain hotels as research object in a 2×2×2 experimental design, our empirical results show that compared to incremental theorists, entity theorists’ controllability and globality attributions toward a serious service failure can be lowered by positive past experience with the organization, while whatever the level of service failure, entity theorists feel more dissatisfaction with the offending employee, but feel more satisfaction with the organization; on the other hand, when faced to a mild service failure, entity theorists’ controllability and globality attributions can be increased and satisfaction toward the organization can be lowered by a negative past experience; while entity theorists’ feel more satisfaction with the organization when serious service failure happens.

Key words: Pseudo relationship, service interaction, service failure, implicit theory of personality