| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 國際經營管理研究所 === 103 === Intercultural service encounters (ICSE) involve interactions between customers and service employees from different cultures. These encounters increased tremendously in recent years due to explosive growth in international travel and immigration as a result of rapid globalization. These encounters can be perceived differently, in terms of expectations and outcomes. Researchers have attributed these difference to the cultural proximity or distance of the customer, it is the extent to which two cultures are different from each other. However, despite growing interest in crosscultural research in service literature, little research has brought thorough analysis on the effects of culture on customer perceptions, and understanding ways in which culture
shapes expectations of customers in ICSEs.
Researchers have found that ICSEs might be evaluated more positively than the ones involving a customer and employee from the same culture. They present their findings by using the zone of tolerance (ZOT), a framework used to illustrate a customer’s evaluation process of a service encounter to illustrate it, claiming an intercultural setting would result in the widening of the ZOT and resulting in more customer satisfaction. However, these studies only focused on tourists and exchange students with limited contact to the host culture during a short period of time. It was suggested that results might be different for respondents who were exposed to a culture for longer period of time, nonetheless, this was never empirically tested. This study attempts to address this gap by focusing on respondents in various stages of acculturation and lengths of exposure to the host culture, to explore what factors contribute to (re)shaping their expectations over time, and how this affects the foreign customer’s zone of tolerance.
Face-to-face interview facilitated with the critical incident technique (CIT) was chosen as the appropriate research method for this study. The transcribing of audio data resulted in 30.000 words available for analysis. The analysis yielded 16 categories consisting of a total of 115 codes based on 469 coded references. Incidents were categorized in three main categories based on the type of interaction, either negative,
positive or unusual. Negative categories of interactions included; different treatment due to different appearance, ignored attempt to speak Chinese, different service protocol, bad attitude, clingy staff, inflexible staff, and inefficient staff. Positive interaction categories were: staff going above and beyond, very friendly staff, and very honest staff. A third category apart was unusual incidents.
Findings of the study suggest a lowering of adequate expectation levels and widening of the ZOT, which confirms assertions made in previous studies. It also confirms previous hypotheses that were never empirically validated by showing that customer expectations change and new referential frameworks are established due to exposure to a new cultural environment. Finally, the research discovers that foreign
customers find it easy and are willing to learn and adapt to some new service process norms, but they resist adapting to other service and cultural service norms in encounters.
This offers significant new insight into the way customers reshape their expectations in ICSEs that goes beyond general assertions made by previous research.
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