Interactional service failures in a pseudorelationship: The role of organizational attributions

The effects of response strategies and severity of failure on consumer attribution with regard to negative word-of-mouth

“…different degrees of inattentiveness during check-in for an airline flight, but this was not the case in Study 2, which involved a hotel employee with an indifferent, unhelpful, and rude attitude. The results in Hess et al [23] provided mixed support for their hypotheses. Therefore, the relationship between severity of failure and attribution of controllability might not be so clear, and may need to be investigated more carefully.…”

“…Attribution of controllability is the extent to which customers perceive the cause of failure as volitional by the service provider [3,23]. Although environmental constraints on service providers may force a failure, sometimes they have opportunities to prevent failures from occurring.…”

“…All scales were adopted from prior studies. For instance, attributions of locus and controllability were each measured with three-item scales adopted from Poon et al [36] and Hess et al [23], respectively. To measure organizational reputation, we adopted the five-item scale from Coombs and Holladay [7], and added one reverse item to check the validity of the responses.…”

“…Weun et al [52] suggested that severity of failure is an important element in evaluating a service provider after a service failure. Hess et al [23] demonstrated that, in an interactional service failure context, severity of failure positively influenced attribution of controllability in Study 1, which involved Table 2 Results of reliability and CFA (n = 282).…”

Six strategies for competing through service: An agenda for future research

“…However, Hess et al (2007) do just that in their study of "Interactional Service Failures in a Pseudorelationship: The Role of Organizational Attributions," which occur when a service provider is rude, inattentive, or unfriendly. When a customer interacts repeatedly with the same firm but encounters different employees across service occasions, the customer's responses distinguish between the offending employee and the organization, such that his or her dissatisfaction with the organization critically depends on the customer's perception of how widespread the failure is in the organization.…”