The Influence of Angry Customer Outbursts on Service Providers' Facial Displays and Affective States

By K. Dallimore, B. Sparks, K. Butcher. 2007

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article explores the existence and extent of emotional contagion, as measured by facial displays and reported affective states, in a service failure event. Using video vignettes of customers complaining about a service failure as stimulus material, the authors measured the facial displays and affective states of service providers as proxies for emotional contagion. Following a two-step approach, service providers' facial expressions were first recorded and assessed, revealing that service providers' facial displays matched those of the angry consumer. Second, a mixed ANOVA revealed service providers reported stronger negative affective states after exposure to an angry complaint than prior to exposure. The results demonstrated that during a complaint situation, angry outbursts by consumers can initiate the emotional contagion process, and service providers are susceptible to “catch” consumer anger through emotional contagion. Implications for complaint management and future research are discussed.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8dd3c1a3f0e1040f67ba1fac6e1a4c505f20f8c4

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Citations in the corpus

Multiple emotional contagions in service encounters (2011, methodology): “Most of those papers consider the process of emotional contagion in their study to be primitive emotional contagion which is mainly based on mimicry (automatic), precognitive responses (i.e., Dallimore et al. 2007; Luong 2005 ;P ugh2001).”
Physical attractiveness of the service worker in the moment of truth and its effects on customer satisfaction (2009, background): “Text-based scenarios (Eroglu, 1987), sometimes also referred to as vignettes (Alexander and Becker, 1978), appear frequently in experiments in the service literature, particularly with respect to research on antecedents to customer satisfaction (cf. Bitner, 1990; Dallimore et al., 2007; Estelami and”
Revisiting the smiling service worker and customer satisfaction (2008, background): “Recent research has shown that the customer’s emotions can evoke emotional reactions in the service worker through emotional contagion (Dallimore et al., 2007), so a complete model of what is happening in emotional terms in a service encounter dyad needs to consider both parties.”
Customer and Employee Incivility and Its Causal Effects in the Hospitality Industry (2017, result): “Customer incivility towards employees and those employees experiencing negative emotions were also supported by the current research study, confirming the findings from the studies by Dallimore et al. (2007) and Skarlicki et al. (2008). Customer incivility led employees to feel more stressed, disapp”
From bad to worse (2012, background): “Dallimore, Sparks, and Butcher (2007) demonstrated in experimental role plays that service providers’ facial displays were congruent with those of customers (i.e., mimicry) and, when exposed to angry customers, they reported greater levels of negative affect.”