The impact of perceived justice on consumers' emotional responses to service complaint experiences

Emotional responses to complaint experiences have received limited research interest. The current paper seeks to address this gap by considering the role of perceived justice in the elicitation of differential emotions following complaint‐handling experiences.

Service scenario scripts were devised to depict a complaint‐handling encounter in relation to holiday check‐in arrangements. The scripts, which varied in terms of levels of interactional, procedural and distributive justice, were presented to a total of 384 respondents. Respondents were asked to imagine themselves as the person in the scenario and to indicate the extent to which different emotional adjectives described their reaction to the complaint‐handling encounter.

Analyses of variance (ANOVA) revealed that perceived justice evaluations were predictive of the type of emotion (i.e. positive or negative) elicited.

Existing theoretical frameworks focus primarily on cognitive evaluations of perceived justice associated with the complaint‐handling encounter; the findings of the current study suggest that a cognitive appraisal of perceived justice may also elicit an emotional response, which in turn is expected to impact on satisfaction with complaint handling.

With a better understanding of the nature and causes of the emotions experienced by customers during service recovery, it should be possible to implement and manage recovery systems that are designed to elicit strongly positive evaluative judgements from consumers.

Demonstrates that different degrees of justice during service recovery will impact on consumers' emotional states.