A Quantitative Analysis of Intercultural Communication and Personality: The Case of Coffee Shop Consumers in Cambodia

Abstract

The article aims to better understand the impact of intercultural communication and personality on customer satisfaction and word of mouth and intention to revisit and to pay more in coffee stores in Cambodia. In this endeavour, the study illustrates the unique context of intercultural communication to highlight several improvements and to encourage the advancement of intercultural communication in the hospitality and tourism literature in Cambodia. Based on the established theories, the study assesses the role of customers’ personality on intercultural communication competence and perceived cultural distance and its impact on interrole congruence and interaction comfort empirically. The research assists in strengthening communication strategies, which is required intercultural communication adjustments in multicultural hospitality business environment. The intercultural communication is expected to improve the tourism industry competitiveness when it positively influences interrole congruence and interaction comfort among service encounters in the industry. To initiate the research, data was gathered by questionnaires within selected coffee stores in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The measurement of the constructs and their interrelationships were examined based on partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The proposed framework provides partly statistically significant relationships among the constructs. Furthermore, the study reveals additional insights into some managerial and theoretical solutions for addressing the intercultural communication of service encounters in the Cambodian hospitality industry. These contributions will postulate an impetus for future research in various service settings.