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Consumers' Affective Response to Delays at Different Phases of a Service Delivery 1
Author(s) -
Dubé Laurette,
Schmitt Bernd H,
Leclerc France
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1991.tb00444.x
Subject(s) - service (business) , affect (linguistics) , psychology , structuring , service delivery framework , field (mathematics) , social psychology , process (computing) , applied psychology , computer science , communication , mathematics , business , marketing , finance , pure mathematics , operating system
A field experiment was conducted in an educational setting to investigate affective reactions occurring at different phases of the delivery of a service. An eight‐minute delay caused more negative affective reactions when it occurred either before the service started (preprocess) or after the service had terminated (postprocess) than when it occurred in the middle of the service encounter (in‐process). No differences were observed for positive affect. Field theory is proposed as a theoretical framework to account for the results, and practical applications for addressing the social problem of structuring waiting environments are discussed.