A Public Organization Provided a Poor Service: Is There Anything They Can Do to Make It Right with the Citizen?

Abstract

This article aimed to investigate the effectiveness of service recovery strategies in a public organization. Justice theory and cognitive appraisal theory were used to develop hypotheses that predicted the impact of recovery strategies (i.e., the quality of the reperformed service, empathetic apology, and the combined effects of empathetic apology and quality of the reperformed service) on justice perceptions and emotional responses. The notion is that these recovery strategies will compensate citizens for the loss incurred during the service failure, thus increasing their perceptions of justice and emotional responses. No article was found to examine the combined effects of empathetic apology and both high and low reperformance on justice and emotional perceptions. To conduct the study, an online survey experiment consisting of 6 vignettes was administered to 1,000 individuals who were recruited by Qualtrics. Furthermore, the organization in the vignettes where the service failure and recovery occurred was the Department of Motor Vehicles. The results from the analyses supported most of the hypotheses. Reperformed service was generally most beneficial when it was done at a high level. Next, combining empathetic apology and high reperformed service recovery was largely found to be more effective than just employing one service recovery strategy or combining empathetic apology and low reperformance. Finally, performing an empathetic apology and a low reperformance is generally not more effective than employing only one strategy. The implication of these results is thoroughly discussed in the article.

Keywords:

• Service Failure
• Service Recovery
• Justice Perceptions
• Positive Word-Of-Mouth
• Recovery Satisfaction
• Public Organizations
• reperformance
• empathetic apology

Data availability statement

The data for the manuscript is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/H1FFHZ.

Notes

1 This point was proposed by an anonymous reviewer.

2 Qualtrics recruits individuals from many sources. Consequently, the nominal incentives participants receive vary. For instance, some individuals are airline customers who join to receive SkyMiles, some are retail customers who receive points at their chosen retail outlet, and others are general consumers who receive cash, gift cards, and so forth.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Gerard Caillier

James Gerard Caillier is a professor in the Master of Public Administration program at the University of Alabama. His research interests concern organizational behavior, human resources, and citizen attitudes towards agency leaders. His book entitled Abusive Supervision in Government was published in Lexington Books, 2021.