The Role of Egoism in Customer Anger - A Not-for-Profit Service Failure Context

Despite considerable effort to make customers happy, things sometimes go wrong. When service failure occurs, the customers often experience negative emotion such as anger, outrage or sadness. Understanding customers’ negative emotions facilitates service providers to handle difficult situations, creating customers’ positive word of mouth and customer retention after the service failure. In a not-for-profit context, when service failure occurs, customers also experience negative emotions. However, whether customers are more sensitive to service failures in a not-for-profit context compared to those in a profit context has yet to be investigated. This paper examines differences between the determinants of customer anger towards service failures in a not-for-profit service failure setting. Amongst the negative emotions, anger is the one of the most extreme, potentially evoking aggressive customer reactions (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983; Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990; Scherer, 1984). Applying the conceptual framework of customer anger proposed by Nguyen and McColl-Kennedy (2003a), this paper uses theories of cognitive appraisal and attribution to explain why and how the determinants of customer anger differentiate indifferent profit service settings (profit vs. not for profit service). This paper will: (1) review relevant literature – service failure typology, attribution theory and cognitive appraisal theory; (2) propose, test and analyse, using Bayesian Network analysis, a conceptual model; and (3) discuss the implications of the findings on not-for profit service settings