Keywords

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Previous research has focused on examining how differences between the services provider and the customer, whether demographic or cultural, contribute to service expectations, service quality and service failure (e.g., Baker et al. 2008). However previous research has not examined how stereotypes of the group that the service provider belongs to might play a role during a service encounter. The main purpose of this research is to examine the role of group stereotypes during service failures. More specifically we examine how stereotypes of warmth and competence influence anger and post failure behaviors. This studied adopted a 2 (competence: high, low) ×2 (warmth: high, low) between subjects experimental design. Data was collected via Mechanical Turk, a crowd sourcing website. We find that consumers experience high levels of anger when the service provider belongs to a group characterized by high levels of warmth, and that this anger leads to a desire to retaliate against the service provider. We also find that anger is likely to be experienced towards service providers from groups that are characterized by high warmth and low competence, e.g., the elderly. Finally, we find that the more competent the group of the service provider the more likely that the consumer is to experience anger, because higher levels of competence imply that the cause of the service failure was controllable.