A friendly relationship with a service provider can sometimes decrease the negative feelings that consumers experience as the result of a service failure. However, friendship is not always beneficial. When consumers focus their attention on the provider’s obligation to respond to their needs, they react more negatively to a service failure when they are friends of the provider than when they have only a business relationship with him or her. When their attention is drawn to their own obligation in the relationship, however, the reverse is true. This difference is confirmed in four experiments in which the perspective from which participants imagined a service failure was activated either by unrelated experiences before being exposed to the failure or by features of the service encounter itself.

This research highlights two cultural tendencies—concern for face and belief in fate—that are characteristic of Asian (vs. Western) consumers. In three cross‐cultural studies on service failures, we show that these cultural tendencies have contrasting effects on consumer tolerance, such that Asian (vs. Western) consumers are more dissatisfied with social failures but less dissatisfied with nonsocial failures. We further demonstrate that these contrasting effects of culture are sensitive to pertinent contextual factors such as the presence of other consumers or a fate‐suggestive brand name. Overall, our research evinces the multidimensionality of cultural influence and points to the need for a sharper focus in conceptualizing cross‐cultural consumer behavior.

This article highlights consumers’ preference for economic (versus social) resources in individualist (versus collectivist) cultures and demonstrates the multifaceted effects of culture on consumer responses to service failures. A cross-cultural study involving American and Chinese participants in the setting of a computer repair service confirms seven of eight hypotheses derived from the resource preference model. The results indicate that Americans (versus Chinese) are more dissatisfied with an outcome failure but less dissatisfied with a process failure. This interactive effect of culture and failure type seems to be driven by a corresponding pattern of attribution tendencies across cultures. Not only do Americans and Chinese differ in service dissatisfaction, but they also tend to express their dissatisfaction in different ways, preferring voice and private responses, respectively. Overall, the resource preference model enhances theoretical understanding of cross-cultural consumer behavior and provides culture-specific guidelines for managing the inevitable service failures.

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Customers’ disposition to register a formal complaint about an inferior product or poor service is often mediated by attributions of responsibility. However, the anger or fear that people happen to be experiencing for totally irrelevant reasons can also influence this disposition. Two field studies and four laboratory experiments indicate that when people feel angry at the time they encounter a service failure, they are more likely to blame the service provider for the failure and more likely to register a complaint. When they experience fear, however, they are uncertain about the cause of their misfortune and decrease their negative reactions relative to conditions in which fear is not experienced. The effects of these incidental emotions are evident both when a service failure is personally experienced and when it is only observed. These effects are eliminated, however, when individuals do not have the cognitive resources available to assess the reasons for the service failure and the conditions surrounding it.

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