The Impact of Service Employee Accents Eliciting Positive Versus Negative Stereotypes on Customer Participation.

Author(s)
David Bourdin, Christina Sichtmann
Abstract

In intercultural service encounters, customers use an employee’s accent as a cue to infer their ethnicity. In an empirical study, we investigate the influence of an employee’s accent on customers’ participation in the service process. We are the first to examine anantecedent (rather than consequences) of customer participation, and to study the effect of employee accents on customer behavior (rather than attitudes). Our results show that accent strength and familiarity do not directly affect customer participation. Rather, aparticular type of accent reduces customer participation due to negative stereotypes, whereas a positively connoted accent does not affect customer participation.

Organisation(s)
Department of Accounting, Innovation and Strategy
External organisation(s)
FHWien der WKW
Publication date
2019
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
502052 Business administration, 502019 Marketing
Keywords
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/dab8964c-86d4-4672-8415-8c2ceb686ceb