Purpose -Emotional responses to complaint experiences have received limited research interest. The current paper seeks to address this gap by considering the role of perceived justice in the elicitation of differential emotions following complaint-handling experiences. Design/methodology/approach -Service scenario scripts were devised to depict a complaint-handling encounter in relation to holiday check-in arrangements. The scripts, which varied in terms of levels of interactional, procedural and distributive justice, were presented to a total of 384 respondents. Respondents were asked to imagine themselves as the person in the scenario and to indicate the extent to which different emotional adjectives described their reaction to the complaint-handling encounter. Findings -Analyses of variance (ANOVA) revealed that perceived justice evaluations were predictive of the type of emotion (i.e. positive or negative) elicited.Research limitations/implications -Existing theoretical frameworks focus primarily on cognitive evaluations of perceived justice associated with the complaint-handling encounter; the findings of the current study suggest that a cognitive appraisal of perceived justice may also elicit an emotional response, which in turn is expected to impact on satisfaction with complaint handling. Practical implications -With a better understanding of the nature and causes of the emotions experienced by customers during service recovery, it should be possible to implement and manage recovery systems that are designed to elicit strongly positive evaluative judgements from consumers. Originality/value -Demonstrates that different degrees of justice during service recovery will impact on consumers' emotional states.

To facilitate efficient and effective service delivery, firms are introducing self-service technologies (SSTs) at an increasing pace. This article presents a meta-analysis of the factors influencing customer acceptance of SSTs. The authors develop a comprehensive causal framework that integrates constructs and relationships from different technology acceptance theories, and they use the framework to guide their meta-analysis of findings consolidated from 96 previous empirical articles (representing 117 independent customer samples with a cumulative sample size of 103,729 respondents). The meta-analysis reveals the following key insights: (1) SST usage is influenced in a complex fashion by numerous predictors that should be examined jointly; (2) ease of use and usefulness are key mediators, and studies ignoring them may underestimate the importance of some predictors; (3) several determinants of usefulness impact ease of use, and vice versa, thereby revealing crossover effects not previously revealed; and (4) the links leading up to SST acceptance in the proposed framework are moderated by SST type (transaction/self-help, kiosk/Internet, public/private, hedonic/utilitarian) and country culture (power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance). Results from the meta-analysis offer managerial guidance for effective implementation of SSTs, and provide directions for further research to augment current knowledge of SST acceptance.

There is widespread recognition in the literature that perceived (in)justice plays an important role in driving postcomplaint behavioral responses to service recovery experiences. However, this literature has evolved with little cross-reference to emotion research. This is problematic because much of psychology research has argued that emotion is the central mechanism through which a sense of (in)justice is translated into subsequent behavior. The current study seeks to address this issue by explicitly considering the role of perceived (in)justice in the elicitation of consumer emotions following service recovery encounters. Specifically, using survey data, the role of emotions in translating perceptions of (in)justice into subsequent postcomplaint behaviors (e.g., repurchase intention, negative word-of-mouth communication and third-party action) is investigated. Results provide empirical evidence for the contention that emotions act as mediators of the relationship between perceived justice and postcomplaint behaviors. These findings have significant implications for the theory and practice of service recovery management.

While numerous studies have examined the benefits of customer participation (CP), understanding of the dark side of involving customers in service firms’ processes is limited. This study proposes that the changing role of customers who actively participate in service co-development can cause role stress and negative feelings, which may, in turn, reduce customer satisfaction and the perceived value of participation. We develop and test a comprehensive role theory–based framework for CP-role stress. Using a video-based experiment, behavioral lab experiment, and field study, we find that greater CP leads to heightened role stress including role conflict, role overload, and role ambiguity. These adverse effects occur contingent on customers’ prior participation experience and firm-provided support. Furthermore, role stress effects vary across service co-development types depending on (a) the scope of the task (i.e., open task, closed task) and (b) the beneficiary of participation (i.e., customer, general market). Specifically, adverse effects are stronger for open than for closed tasks, and they also tend to be stronger when the beneficiary is the general market rather than the individual customer. These findings emphasize the need for more cross-context theorizing in CP research. Managers should consider these adverse effects and implement measures that reduce role stress.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints -eprint.ncl.ac.uk Heirati N, O'Cass A, Schoefer K, Siahtiri V. Do professional service firms benefit from customer and supplier collaborations in competitive, turbulent environments?.