Emotions in service encounters from the perspectives of employees and customers

Abstract: The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to deepening and extending our understanding and knowledge of emotions in service encounters by studying it from the two most central human actors in service encounter: (i) the service firm’s employees and (ii) the customer of this firm. This dissertation consist of five separate papers that conceptualize and empirically investigate how different appraisals by employees and customers generate positive and negative emotions, and how types of emotions in service encounters are linked to patterns of behavioural responses. The methods used for gathering data involved interviews and questionnaire studies of various service firms. This dissertation has sought to offer two main contributions. First, this thesis presents an extended understanding of employees’ emotions in service encounter and their effect on employees’ perceptions of service quality. One of the chief findings is that work-related conditions such as employees’ perception of their working role and managerial practices are related to both positive and negative emotions in service encounters. Moreover, the findings indicate that there exists a spill-over effect between employees’ experiences of emotions and employees’ perceptions of the delivery of service quality in service encounters. Secondly, this thesis also contributes to furthering our understanding of the customer’s appraisal of service quality with respect to customers’ positive emotions in service encounters as well as to deepening our understanding of negative emotions when customers experience a negative service encounter. Specifically, it was found that both human and non-human service-quality factors are able to trigger customer’s positive emotions in service encounters. Positive emotions were strongly related to behavioural responses such as customer loyalty. When a customer experiences negative emotions in service encounters as a result of negative experience, the findings point to three sources of these negative emotions: (i) ‘self’ (the customer’s own fault), (ii) ‘other’ (the fault of the company), and (iii) ‘situational’ (the fault is beyond the customer’s and company’s control). Another finding is that customers’ negative emotions in service encounters tend diminish but only to some extent, even after the service firm has set into motion a process of service recovery.In summary, this thesis contributes to our understanding of emotions in service encounters and contributes to the ongoing debate and discussion in service research about the role of emotions in this context.