The Effects of Online Incivility and Consumer-to-Consumer Interactional Justice on Complainants, Observers, and Service Providers during Social Media Service Recovery

By T. Bacile, Jeremy S. Wolter, Alexis M. Allen, Pei Xu. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2018

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the current research examines online incivility in relation to service recovery on social media. First, findings from a netnographic investigation suggest consumer-to-consumer (C2C) incivility results in some consumers holding the firm accountable to address uncivil exchanges on a firm-managed communication channel. Based on the netnographic findings, fairness theory, and justice theory, a follow-up experimental study assesses how online incivility negatively affects service recovery outcomes (firm–consumer justice) when a firm chooses (not) to respond to the incivility. Through these two studies, the current paper proposes a new form of justice (C2C interactional justice) and posits that online service recovery extends beyond direct victims of the incivility (first-party justice) to also include observers (third-party justice). This more nuanced view of justice associated with a service recovery is especially significant when considering the traditional relationships of justice with satisfaction, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and other desirable firm outcomes. For practitioners, this research suggests that firms must manage C2C interactional justice on corporate social media channels for both complainants and observers to avoid reputational damage and a loss of customers.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0558132c2730909996836c5653d860c030726d8d

How researchers see this paper

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In Information Systems and Management

1. Raffaele Filieri
2. Ana Javornik
3. Ali Abdallah Alalwan

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Ralph Gumann
2. Raffaele Filieri
3. Ana Javornik
4. Hanqun Song
5. Jong-Hyeong Kim

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Ralph Gumann
2. Raffaele Filieri
3. Ana Javornik
4. Ali Abdallah Alalwan
5. Hanqun Song
6. Jong-Hyeong Kim

Citations in the corpus

• “Don't Forget that Others Are Watching, Too!” The Effect of Conversational Human Voice and Reply Length on Observers’ Perceptions of Complaint Handling in Social Media (2020, background): “This work responds to calls for further research on the message style that companies should adopt when addressing negative comments online (Bacile et al., 2018) and about observers' reactions to complaint handling in social media (Colm et al.”