Whose fault is it? An empirical study on the impact of responsibility attribution for customer misbehavior

This research paper aims to provide an understanding of how customers evaluate other customers’ misbehavior, considering the attribution of responsibility and how service employees should react in the respective situation.

Two sequential studies using written scenarios are conducted, including manipulations for responsibility (deviant customer vs employee) and employee effort (high vs medium).

The results show that observing customers perceive misbehavior caused by the deviant customer as more severe and feel more intense negative emotions than when an employee is attributed as being responsible. Employee responsibility, however, elicits higher recovery expectations, which in turn decide the level of employee effort required to ensure observing customers’ satisfaction.

Due to the exploratory research objective and the use of a restricted sample and written scenarios, the studies may be subject to restrictions. Further studies will ensure generalizability.

Because different customer expectations arise from the respective responsibility for customer misbehavior, service employees should be encouraged to differentiate their efforts when approaching misbehavior. In case of their own responsibility, employees need to exert higher efforts to restore a functional service encounter, whereas in cases of customer responsibility, medium efforts are sufficient to stop the misbehaving customer.

This research contributes to understanding of cognitive and emotional responses to customer misbehavior considering the attribution of responsibility and indicates how service employees may handle these situations.