Cedric Hsi-Jui Wu
Associate Professor, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan.
Hung-Jen Li
National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan.The Study on Antecedents of Customer Satisfaction
from Interpersonal Emotional Contagion
Perspective
Most previous studies focus on the effects of service encounter
factors (e.g., physical surroundings, personnel performance,
compatibility management) on customer responses. Although emotion
in service encounters has been identified as a key factor influencing
customer satisfaction, many service researches only concern the
influences of employee emotion on customers’ evaluations of the
service interaction. However, person-to-person encounters (including
emotion transmissions) play an important role in successful service
delivery process, but few studies discuss the theme of interpersonal
emotion transmission (including employee-to-customer and customer-
to-customer emotion transmissions) during service encounters.
Therefore, based on emotional contagion and emotional labor theories,
this study attempts to examine the relationships among authenticity of
the employee’s emotional display, display of employee’s positive
emotion, perceived others’ emotional appraisal, employee
expertise/competence, customer positive affect, and customer
satisfaction. Data were collected from the consumers having
consumption experience in the chain restaurants by survey, and 369
valid samples were obtained. The analytical results showed as follows.
First, both the authenticity of the employee’s emotional display and
perceived others’ emotional appraisal positively influence customer
positive affect; instead, the display of employee’s positive emotion and
employee expertise/competence have no significantly effect on
customer positive affect. In addition, customer satisfaction is positively
related to the authenticity of the employee’s emotional display,
employee expertise/competence, and customer positive emotion; but,
the display of employee’s positive emotion has no significantly
influence on customer satisfaction. Overall, these findings provide some
important managerial implications.