Attributions of Service Quality: Immigrant Customers’ Perspective

Autor(en)

Christina Sichtmann, Milena Micevski

Abstrakt

Purpose
This study aims to investigate whether and how strongly cultural (mis)matches influence immigrant customers’ satisfaction, as well as if this relationship is mediated by cultural or service employee performance attributions. In addition, the authors test whether attributions differ depending on the service delivery outcome (success vs failure).

Design/methodology/approach
The 2 (origin of service employee: Austria or Turkey) × 2 (service delivery outcome: success or failure) scenario-based experiment includes 120 Turkish immigrant customers in Austria.

Findings
Contrary to previous research, the results indicate that in an immigrant customer context, cultural (mis)match does not influence customer satisfaction. The service delivery outcome is a boundary condition. With a positive service delivery outcome, immigrant customers attribute the results to the cultural background of the employee if it is the same as their own, but they attribute success to employees’ performance if they belong to the immigration destination culture. For negative service delivery outcomes, neither cultural nor performance attributions arise.

Originality/value
This study is the first to focus specifically on immigrant customer behavior in a high-involvement service context. The results challenge the predictions of social identity theory and the similarity-attraction paradigm and highlight that the immigrant context is unique. In this context, attributions play a key role in determining customer satisfaction.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Rechnungswesen, Innovation und Strategie

Journal

Journal of Services Marketing

Band

32

Seiten

559-569

Anzahl der Seiten

11

ISSN

0887-6045

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-06-2017-0212

Publikationsdatum

04-2018

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

502052 Betriebswirtschaftslehre, 502019 Marketing

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Marketing

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 10 – Weniger Ungleichheiten

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/attributions-of-service-quality-immigrant-customers-perspective(a9b994b1-df5e-4d78-ab5e-9138fde94f04).html