Disentangling the Differential Roles of Warmth and Competence Judgments in Customer-Service Provider Relationships

By Pascal Güntürkün, Till Haumann, Sven Mikolon. Journal of services research, 2020

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite increasing interest in warmth and competence as fundamental dimensions in consumers’ evaluation of service providers, prior research remains ambiguous about which dimension is more important. The current study develops a nomological framework that clarifies this ambiguity and explains whether, when, and why warmth or competence takes precedence for different outcomes in customer-service provider relationships. Combined evidence from field and laboratory studies support the notion of an asymmetric dominance, which suggests that warmth is dominant in driving outcomes that capture relational aspects (e.g., customer-company identification), whereas competence is dominant in driving outcomes that capture transactional aspects of the customer-service provider relationship (e.g., share of wallet). The findings provide first insights into the underlying mechanisms that drive this asymmetric dominance by demonstrating that relational and capability concerns mediate this process. Moreover, the current investigation identifies novel moderators that offer managers help in identifying service contexts (people vs. object care) and customer segments (differing in process and outcome service goals) for which investing in warmth or competence is more promising. Overall, displaying competence is particular effective in driving customer attraction and current operating performance, whereas displaying warmth is better suited to establish strong emotional bonds and drive customer retention.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ac70bf9d08e2cd5bc13b5b1612672eef205d539

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Citations in the corpus

Examining the effects of robots' physical appearance, warmth, and competence in frontline services: The Humanness‐Value‐Loyalty model (2021, background): “Focusing on humanness cues, literature on social cognition identifies competence and warmth as the two universal perceptions that drive people's impressions of persons (Fiske et al., 2007) and services (Güntürkün et al., 2020).”