Chia-Ching Tsai

Does relationship matter? – Customers’ response to service failure

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how service failure affects customers’ negative response and how service recovery affects perceived justice in the context of different relationship norms. Design/methodology/approach – It includes four studies that examine how relationships influence customer reactions to service failures. In study 1, the paper examines how service failures affect customers’ negative reaction. In study 2, the paper examines how service recoveries influence perceived justice. Study 3 and study 4 test the robustness of the results of study 1 and study 2. All studies have a 2×2 between-subjects design. Findings – The results show that individuals in exchange relationships experience a stronger feeling of betrayal than those in communal relationships during service failures. Further, individuals feel more betrayed and show greater negative responses during process failures. They perceive greater justice when offered physical recoveries, which, in turn, contributes to higher s...

The effect of direction, self-relevance, and focus of social comparisons on self-evaluation: interpretation via assimilation and contrast effects.

This study investigated the effect of direction, self-relevance, and focus of social comparisons on self-evaluation. 160 participants (76 men, 84 women; 19–27 years old) were enrolled from a marketing class. Using self as the focus of comparison will cause a contrast effect, while using others as the focus of comparison will have an assimilation effect. When the comparison dimension is highly self-relevant, a contrast effect will be observed on self-evaluation, while an assimilation effect will be observed when the comparison dimension is low on self-relevance. Also, when self is the focus of comparison, a highly self-relevant comparison dimension will make the contrast effect stronger, while a dimension with low self-relevance will make the contrast effect weaker. Conversely, when others are the focus of comparison, a comparison dimension that has low self-relevance will make the assimilation effect stronger, while a highly self-relevant one will weaken it. Primary results in this study were an interaction of comparison direction by focus of comparison and an interaction of comparison direction by self-relevance on self-evaluation.

The effect of social comparison with peers on self-evaluation.

Social comparison refers to self-evaluation against other people. When people are outperformed by peers in a domain relevant (irrelevant) to them, it negatively (positively) affects how they evaluate themselves, compared to an irrelevant (relevant) domain. Whether a domain is self-relevant or self-irrelevant, the comparison direction and closeness should interact on how people evaluate themselves. Taiwanese undergraduates (N = 276) ages 19 to 22 years (M = 20.5, SD = 1.8), participated to assess whether the results from Western samples would be similar to those in an Asian sample, which were expected to be more collectivist.