Attributions of service quality: immigrant customers’ perspective

Abstract

Purpose-This study aims to investigate whether and how strongly cultural (mis)matches influence immigrant customers' satisfaction, as well as if this relationship is mediated by cultural or service employee performance attributions. In addition, the authors test whether attributions differ depending on the service delivery outcome (success vs failure). Design/methodology/approach-The 2 (origin of service employee: Austria or Turkey) Â 2 (service delivery outcome: success or failure) scenariobased experiment includes 120 Turkish immigrant customers in Austria. Findings-Contrary to previous research, the results indicate that in an immigrant customer context, cultural (mis)match does not influence customer satisfaction. The service delivery outcome is a boundary condition. With a positive service delivery outcome, immigrant customers attribute the results to the cultural background of the employee if it is the same as their own, but they attribute success to employees' performance if they belong to the immigration destination culture. For negative service delivery outcomes, neither cultural nor performance attributions arise. Originality/value-This study is the first to focus specifically on immigrant customer behavior in a high-involvement service context. The results challenge the predictions of social identity theory and the similarity-attraction paradigm and highlight that the immigrant context is unique. In this context, attributions play a key role in determining customer satisfaction.

Challenges and opportunities for services marketers in a culturally diverse global marketplace

“…All the papers included in this special issue make a useful contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the services customers and service employees in multicultural markets; however there are still many unaddressed issues and unanswered questions that future research may address. First, most current research on this topic is still restricted to only a few countries, such as Australia (Summers et al, 2018), India (Malik et al, 2018;Mathies and Wong, 2018;Mishra et al, 2018) and United States (Ang et al, 2018;Mathies and Wong, 2018;Zolfagharian et al, 2018), with some exceptions such as Austria (Sichtmann and Micevski, 2018) and Chile (Pezzuti et al, 2018). Hence, we need more studies in other countries that have traditionally been multi-cultural, such as Brazil, UK, Singapore and Malaysia as well as those that have become multi-cultural more recently as a result of the rise in immigration, such as Germany, France and Italy.…”

“…Customer responses in intercultural service encounters e.g., customer reactions to ethnic/cultural dissimilarity with servicce employees (Etgar and Fuchs, 2011), service failure and recovery (de Matos et al, 2011), employee's acculturation behaviours (Poulis et al, 2013), ethnic accents (Tombs and Rao Hill, 2014); stereotyping of culturally different service employees by customers (Hopkins et al, 2005;Javalgi and Martin, 2007;Ueltschy et al, 2007), perceived discrimination by service employees Antecedents of customer and employee perceptions and behaviours in intercultural service encounters e.g., attentiveness (Lee, 2015), acculturation behaviours (Gaur et al, 2017) and linguistic choices of frontline service employees (Zolfagharian et al, 2018), language homophily between customers and employees (Pezzuti et al, 2018), perceived cultural distance and customer participation (Ang et al, 2018), customer-employee (mis)match and cultural vs. non-cultural attributions (Sichtmann and Micevski, 2018), Intercultural competence and customer facial recognition (Henderson et al, 2018), Technology readiness and consumer socialization of teenagers (Mishra, Maheswarappa and Colby, 2018), religiosity and consumer choice of fitness services (Summers et al, 2018), Impact of service models and culture on work behaviours (Mathies and Wong, 2018).…”

“…This study is among the first attempts to highlight the importance of consumers' social judgements about culturally dissimilar service providers, which can be influenced through greater customer participation. The third paper, titled "Attributions of service quality: immigrant customers' perspective" (Sichtmann and Micevski, 2018), investigates the impact of cultural (mis)match on immigrant customers' satisfaction and the mediating role of cultural and employee performance attributions in this relationship. In addition, the authors test the moderating effect of service delivery outcome (success vs. failure) on the above process.…”

“…culture shock (Stauss and Mang, 1999), perceived discrimination (Barker and Härtel, 2004), cross-cultural interaction comfort (Paswan and Ganesh, 2005), consumer ethnocentrism (Javalgi and Martin, 2007;Sharma et al, 2005;Ueltschy et al, 2007), perceived cultural distance, interaction comfort, inter-role congruence, intercultural competence (Sharma et al, 2009(Sharma et al, , 2012 Antecedents of customer and employee perceptions and behaviours in intercultural service encounters e.g. attentiveness (Lee, 2015), acculturation behaviours (Gaur et al, 2017) and linguistic choices of frontline service employees (Zolfagharian et al, 2018), language homophily between customers and employees (Pezzuti et al, 2018), perceived cultural distance and customer participation (Ang et al, 2018), customer-employee (mis)match and cultural vs non-cultural attributions (Sichtmann and Micevski, 2018), Intercultural competence and customer facial recognition (Henderson et al, 2018), Technology readiness and consumer socialization of teenagers (Mishra et al, 2018), religiosity and consumer choice of fitness services (Summers et al, 2018), impact of service models and culture on work behaviours (Mathies and Wong, 2018) Moderators of customer and employee perceptions and behaviours in intercultural service encounters e.g. service role and outcome , consumer ethnocentrism and intercultural competence (Sharma and Zhan, 2015), intercultural communication competence (Ihtiyar and Ahmad, 2015) and personal cultural orientations (Sharma et al, 2016) Mediators of customer and employee perceptions and behaviours in intercultural service encounters e.g.…”

A Comparison of Service Quality Dimensions in the Mobile Service Market: Evidence from Emerging Markets

“…Delivering quality services to customers is intuitively and empirically the most important factor in satisfying and retaining customers as well as building and sustaining profitability [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]. Services organizations find it more essential than ever in the modern digital economy to provide high quality services to customers in order to enhance customer retention [10] [11] [12]. In the telecommunications sector, service quality is of paramount importance as a strategic tool to attract and retain customers, as the sector has reached the maturity stage in several parts of the world, with over 100% penetration globally.…”