IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/bushor/v63y2020i5p647-658.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The differential treatment of women during service recovery: How perceived social power affects consumers’ postfailure compensation

Author

Listed:
  • Hill Cummings, Krista
  • Seitchik, Allison E.

Abstract

Female consumers often experience marketplace discrimination in service encounters. Researchers have examined women’s differential treatment in many settings, but they have yet to study how women are treated during service-recovery encounters. We found evidence that male providers discriminated against female consumers during the service-recovery process in three experiments. Specifically, male providers offered less compensation to female consumers who complained after a failure than to male consumers who experienced the same failure. Further, we found that perceptions of consumer social power may explain this effect. We offer suggestions for how firms can identify internal marketplace gender discrimination, as well as how they can prevent and treat this significant problem. We also suggest that managers create anticipatory protocols and scripts and engage employees in both bias and interpersonal accuracy training.

Suggested Citation

  • Hill Cummings, Krista & Seitchik, Allison E., 2020. "The differential treatment of women during service recovery: How perceived social power affects consumers’ postfailure compensation," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 63(5), pages 647-658.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:63:y:2020:i:5:p:647-658
    DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2020.06.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681320300914
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ayres, Ian & Siegelman, Peter, 1995. "Race and Gender Discrimination in Bargaining for a New Car," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(3), pages 304-321, June.
    2. Caitlin Knowles Myers & Marcus Bellows & Hiba Fakhoury & Douglas Hale & Alexander Hall & Kaitlin Ofman, 2010. "Ladies first? A field study of discrimination in coffee shops," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(14), pages 1761-1769.
    3. Laufer, Daniel & Coombs, W. Timothy, 2006. "How should a company respond to a product harm crisis? The role of corporate reputation and consumer-based cues," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 49(5), pages 379-385.
    4. Basil Halperin & Benjamin Ho & John List & Ian Muir, 2018. "Toward an understanding of the economics of apologies: evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment," Natural Field Experiments 00644, The Field Experiments Website.
    5. Grégoire, Yany & Salle, Audrey & Tripp, Thomas M., 2015. "Managing social media crises with your customers: The good, the bad, and the ugly," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 173-182.
    6. Wise, Gordon L, 1974. "Differential Pricing and Treatment by New-Car Salesmen: The Effect of the Prospect's Race, Sex, and Dress," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 47(2), pages 218-230, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:63:y:2020:i:5:p:647-658. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Haili He). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.