The Impacts of Employees´ Emotions on Service Responsibility Attribution When Customers Participate in Services

The existence of self-serving bias in the customers´ responsibility attribution of service outcomes in which they participate has never been empirically tested. As an important branch in service management, extant research on emotion management of service employees mainly draws on the theory of emotional contagion, but goes silent on how service employee´s emotions affect customers´ cognitive judgments. In an attempt to fill these two gaps, the current study sheds light on how customers´ responsibility attribution of service outcomes depends on service employee´s emotion displays and analyzes the moderating effects of two personality traits - need for cognition and need for affect on service responsibility attribution.