Service recovery is a crucial success factor for organizations. Thus, many studies have addressed the issue of post-complaint behavior. Conducting a meta-analysis, the authors test the following path model: ‘‘organizational responses (compensation, favorable employee behavior, and organizational procedures) → justice perceptions (distributive, interactional, and procedural justice) → post-complaint satisfaction (transaction-specific and cumulative satisfaction) → customer behavioral intentions (loyalty and positive word of mouth [WOM]).’’ The results confirm this model as well as the mediating role of justice perceptions and post-complaint satisfaction. Surprisingly, the results also show that the common contention of distributive justice as the salient driver of service recovery is only true for transaction-specific satisfaction, which in turn reinforces positive WOM. Cumulative satisfaction, however, which is the primary antecedent of customer loyalty, even slightly more depends on interactional justice than on distributive justice. Further, the results show that the relationships between justice perceptions and satisfaction constructs depend on several moderators such as target group, industry, and complaint type. A major managerial implication is the fact that organizations should pay particular attention to distributive justice when complainants are students and to interactional justice when failure is nonmonetary or occurs in service industries. The authors discuss theoretical implications and provide suggestions for future research.

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This article examines how compensation type and failure type explain the recovery effect of compensation, using a meta-analysis (Study 1) and an experiment (Study 2). Drawing on resource exchange theory, we propose new classifications for both compensation and failure type and find three major results. First, consistent with our matching hypothesis, the strongest recovery effect is generally observed when compensation represents a resource similar to the failure it is supposed to offset, that is, immediate monetary compensation for a monetary failure, exchange for a flawed product, reperformance for a failed service, and psychological compensation for lack of attention. Surprisingly, lack of attention may also be rectified by the other compensation types. Second, consistent with our intertemporal choice hypothesis, immediate monetary compensation is generally more effective than delayed monetary compensation. Yet, this effect also varies with failure type. Third, resource-based classifications explain the recovery effect of compensation better than current classifications of compensation and failure type. As a theoretical contribution, the resource-based classifications help to explain the fluctuating effect sizes of compensation reported in prior research. From a managerial point of view, practitioners can choose the appropriate compensation type for a failure, one that repays in kind what customers have lost. As a result, companies achieve stronger recovery effects without additional costs.

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