Customer Attitudes Towards Foreign-Accented Employees: Consequences for Voluntary, Replaceable, and Mandatory Customer Participation in Services

Autor(en)

David Bourdin, Christina Sichtmann

Abstrakt

Research Question
Approximately 272 million people live outside their country of birth and intercultural service encounters have become very common. In such interactions, customers use audiovisual cues to infer the employee’s ethnicity, which usually evokes cultural stereotypes. One such cue is
accent, which may be easily discernable for listeners and seems to play a more important role in ethnic categorization than physical appearance, but is also malleable and can be reduced with effort and training. Besides an increasing non-native workforce, services are also
undergoing drastic changes on the consumer side. In an era of connected, informed, empowered, and active consumers, enabling them to be co-producers of a firm’s core offering is considered the next frontier in competitive effectiveness. This co-creation of value is achieved through customer participation in the service process. However, there is not a single paper on how an employee’s accent might influence customer participation, a research gap that we aim to address by drawing from three different research fields (linguistics, cultural stereotyping, transformative services). Our research question is: How does a service employee’s accent influence customer participation?

Method and Data
We conducted three online studies, for which participants were recruited using a quota sampling method. In all three studies, participants were asked to imagine a given fictitious service encounter. There were always several between-subjects conditions (local accent vs. foreign accent(s)), in which participants listed to a one-minute audio scenario of a service employee speaking. By using the same voice actor in all recordings, speaker-specific variables were held constant (e.g., speech rate, voice pitch and loudness). There were several manipulation checks, namely accent strength, foreignness, liking, and familiarity, to ensure that our manipulations were successful. The focal constructs were assessed using existing multiitem scales that proved to be highly reliable. The three studies achieved sample sizes of 187, 377, and 310 respondents. Mediation and moderation analyses were performed with SPSS PROCESS.

Summary of Findings
Our findings from Study 1 show that a foreign accent weakens customer participation indirectly through reduced intelligibility, but that cultural distance does not play a role. Consistent with a negativity bias, Study 2 revealed that an unfavorable accent negatively affects customer participation (partially because the service provider is viewed as less attractive and dynamic), whereas the effect of a positively valenced accent is non-significant. In Study 3, we differentiated between three types of participation that have previously been studied in isolation or mixed without differentiation. We found that an unfavorable accent has a negative effect on voluntary participation, but, in contrast, increases replaceable participation indirectly through reduced trust. We also examined individual and situational factors that may accentuate or attenuate customers’ participation intentions, and found that the effect of accent-induced trust on replaceable participation is reinforced when customers have a strong need for interaction (i.e., when they value and enjoy personal contact with frontline employees).

Statement of Key Contributions
First, we explore the effect of an employee’s accent on a customer behavior, whereas previous studies have assessed customer feelings, perceptions, or expectations. Second, we differentiate between negatively and positively valenced accents, while prior findings were mostly limited to stigmatized accents such as Indian or Filipino and may therefore not be generalizable. Distinguishing between different accents and their valence helps to understand whether customer responses differ across accent types. Third, we also find significant indirect effects
and a moderation effect. Our work thus deepens the existing understanding of the underlying mechanisms that lead consumers to adopt or withhold certain behaviors upon hearing an accented employee. Indeed, extant studies do not help to disentangle contradictory findings because they have mainly applied simple stimulus-response experiments, but did not model the intervening variables. Fourth, we differentiate between three types of participation that have previously been studied in isolation or mixed without differentiation: mandatory, replaceable, and voluntary activities. In doing so, our paper enhances the conceptual and empirical clarity in this field. Finally, in contrast to virtually all studies, we shed light on an antecedent rather than a consequence of customer participation.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Marketing und International Business

Externe Organisation(en)

FHWien der WKW

Band

32

Publikationsdatum

2021

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

502052 Betriebswirtschaftslehre, 502020 Marktforschung

Schlagwörter

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/customer-attitudes-towards-foreignaccented-employees-consequences-for-voluntary-replaceable-and-mandatory-customer-participation-in-services(79447cc9-5b35-4478-9ca5-84f13f6d3a5c).html