There's not much to tell: The impact of emotional resilience on negative word‐of‐mouth following service failure

Abstract

Abstract Consumers routinely experience service failures in their daily lives. Research regarding such service failures has primarily focused on characteristics of and actions taken by the service provider and has thus far overlooked the role that consumers' own cognitions might play in determining their behavioral responses to service failures. In particular, emotional resilience—or the ability to rebound from negative experiences (including even the most banal service failures)—has been neglected in prior research. Addressing this gap in the literature, we examine the mechanisms that highly resilient consumers use to manage the negative experience of service failures and gauge whether those mechanisms can effectively reduce negative word‐of‐mouth. Across three studies, we evince that high trait resilient individuals are less likely to engage in negative word‐of‐mouth following service failures because they spontaneously utilize cognitive reappraisal—a strategy for emotion regulation. Importantly, this research suggests that the emotion regulation strategies spontaneously adopted by high trait resilient individuals can be successfully utilized by all consumers after an external prompt. Managing consumers' emotional responses in the face of service failures is shown to have positive benefits for the firm by reducing negative word‐of‐mouth. Notably, such interventions may benefit firms even when the opportunity for a service recovery is not presented.