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This study aims to develop a model based on attribution theory and intercultural literature to explain the underlying customer satisfaction process in intercultural service encounters.

In-depth interviews were used to develop an understanding of customer experience and evaluations in intercultural service encounters. A quasi-experiment with 236 customers was used to empirically examine the relationships between perceived culture distance, cultural attribution, intercultural competence and customer satisfaction.

Perceived culture distance is positively related to customer satisfaction, with cultural attribution mediating the relationship between perceived cultural distance and customer satisfaction, and partially mediating the moderating effect of intercultural competence on the relationship between perceived culture distance and customer satisfaction.

This study focuses on cultural attribution in intercultural service encounters. It is acknowledged that there are other attribution dimensions such as stability and controllability which may interact with perceived culture distance and influence subsequent customer satisfaction evaluation. Future research should consider these various dimensions and examine their mediating role in customer satisfaction.

It is recommended that service firms educate their customers of diverse cultures about local norms and practices, and proactively manage their expectations throughout the service experience.

Despite the growing importance of intercultural service encounters, the findings of the relationship between perceived cultural distance and customer satisfaction are mixed. This study contributes to the literature by advancing our theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence of the role of cultural attribution and intercultural competence in intercultural service encounters.

This paper aims to examine the role that personal cultural orientations play in customer attributions in intercultural service encounters.

A conceptual model was developed depicting the relationships between service delivery outcome, personal cultural orientations and customer attributions. Data were collected from 640 Chinese and Western customers using scenario-based experiments in a restaurant context to assess the hypothesized relationships in the model.

The findings show that compared to service delivery success, customers tend to hold service employee and firm responsible for service delivery failure rather than themselves and cultural differences. Moreover, personal cultural orientations partially moderated the influence of the service delivery outcome on customer attributions.

Future research could adopt different methodologies such as critical incident techniques and surveys to replicate the study.

Service firms are recommended to design programs to influence customer attributions such as “customer education programs” and “customer appreciation programs” to achieve high customer satisfaction.

This study examines the differences in customer attributions between successful vs unsuccessful service delivery. It also sheds light on the potential moderating role of personal cultural orientations on the relationship between service delivery outcome and customer attributions.

This study aims to investigate whether and how strongly cultural (mis)matches influence immigrant customers’ satisfaction, as well as if this relationship is mediated by cultural or service employee performance attributions. In addition, the authors test whether attributions differ depending on the service delivery outcome (success vs failure).

The 2 (origin of service employee: Austria or Turkey) × 2 (service delivery outcome: success or failure) scenario-based experiment includes 120 Turkish immigrant customers in Austria.

Contrary to previous research, the results indicate that in an immigrant customer context, cultural (mis)match does not influence customer satisfaction. The service delivery outcome is a boundary condition. With a positive service delivery outcome, immigrant customers attribute the results to the cultural background of the employee if it is the same as their own, but they attribute success to employees’ performance if they belong to the immigration destination culture. For negative service delivery outcomes, neither cultural nor performance attributions arise.

This study is the first to focus specifically on immigrant customer behavior in a high-involvement service context. The results challenge the predictions of social identity theory and the similarity-attraction paradigm and highlight that the immigrant context is unique. In this context, attributions play a key role in determining customer satisfaction.

This study examines the method of scenario analysis as a means of exposing hidden assumptions which cause misattributions that lead to multicultural conflict and as a way of assessing cross‐cultural understanding. Results from thirty‐five critical incident interviews of technical professionals and semi‐structured scenario questionnaires from graduate business and engineering students are presented. The results provide support for the use of scenarios as a method of exposing hidden assumptions leading to multicultural conflict and as a process which helps participants deal with the conflict. Implications for organizational research and practice are discussed, including the use of scenario analysis as an evaluation and measurement tool for culturally‐related conflict in organizations.

This study aims to examine the impact of controversial governance practices on media coverage under a specific context. Based on the attribution theory, this study develops a theoretical framework to explore how antecedent factors can influence attribution process under a particular cultural context.

This paper presents a behavioral view of the media and corporate governance to demonstrate how media attributes different reasons for the same controversial governance practice in Chinese-specific context. Using 1,198 non-state-owned listed company observations in China as the study sample, cross-section data are used to build a multiple linear regression mode to test hypotheses.

The analysis indicates that the media imposes fewer penalties on founder-CEO firms than on non-founder-CEO firms for engaging in controversial governance practices, such as CEO compensation. CEO tenure negatively moderates the effect of CEO compensation on negative media coverage in non-founder-CEO firms. The positive media bias evidence for founder-CEO firms exists only when the firm is better performed.

This study’s contribution to the governance literature starts with its logical reasoning of basic assumptions in the agency theory, and that media penalty will arise when managers impose actions that against interests of shareholders or other stakeholders. This study shows that the rule is not always true. The findings also bridge the connection of governance literature and reputation literature to better explain how media can act as a social arbitration role.

This study provides insights into how belief and information of reputational evaluators affect attribution consequences on controversial governance practices. Moreover, this study looks beyond the internal elements and focuses on China’s traditional cultural context as well. Specifically, the authors concentrate on the attribution process by showing the importance of evaluators’ framing tendency with regard to controversial practices. The results extend the knowledge about how conformity makes media coverage shows a bias effect on interactions during the evaluation process.

Previous studies have found significant differences in consumer attitudes toward marketing between countries and attributed such variations to differences in the stage of consumerism development and cultural values. This study aims to test these competing hypotheses using econometric decomposition to identify the source of such cross‐country variations.

Using survey data of consumer attitudes toward marketing from China and Canada, this study adopts econometric decomposition to examine the cross‐country difference in consumer attitudes toward marketing.

The results show that Chinese consumers have more positive attitudes toward marketing than Canadians and the two countries differ significantly across all predictor variables. However, the results of decomposition suggest that consumerism, individualism and relativism do not have any significant effect on the country gap in consumer attitudes toward marketing, while idealism has a significant coefficient effect.

The study finds different effects of cultural values on consumer attitudes across countries and has meaningful implications for international marketing strategies.

The study investigates the sources of cross‐national differences in consumer attitudes toward marketing using rigorous analyses to improve the accuracy of cultural attribution for international marketing and cross‐cultural consumer research.

Based on attributional complexity (AC) theory, the authors empirically examine the impact of biculturalism on cross-cultural adjustment and the degree to which people make isomorphic attributions, critical for cross-cultural leadership effectiveness.

Using questionnaire surveys, the authors first validate measures in a validation sample and then empirically test the model in a second sample, using structural equation modeling.

The authors’ findings reveal an empirical connection between biculturalism and AC on the one hand, while also showing support for the relationship between biculturalism and attributional knowledge. Findings also demonstrate that biculturalism is related to attributional accuracy in cross-cultural contexts via an attributional mechanism, as suggested by AC theory.

First, AC theory emerges as one with excellent prospects for explaining intercultural work in multicultural settings. Biculturalism's links to AC and attributional knowledge are critical for extensions to cross-cultural leadership effectiveness, and international knowledge transfer, interesting and high potential research avenues for the discipline.

The authors’ findings carry a host of managerial implications. AC training can provide all international assignees with the necessary foundational skills and learning abilities to successfully interact in the host country setting with local nationals. This study also suggests that managers on international assignments should focus their efforts on acquiring attributional knowledge because it can provide a solid boost to their understanding of the local culture.

One’s understanding of biculturals and their cross-cultural management competencies is very limited. The authors provide empirical support for the hypotheses, hitherto unexamined in extant literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether ethnic consumers' consumption of cultural apparel, and attributional responses related to their consumption, is predicted by their strength of ethnic identification. The study also examined whether the consumption of cultural apparel mediates the influence of strength of ethnic identification on consumers' attributional responses.

Internet survey research was the chosen methodology for this study. A convenience sample of 106 research participants from four ethnic subcultures in the USA were recruited.

Regression analyses revealed that strength of ethnic identification was a significant predictor of cultural apparel consumption and attribution of emotions and meanings to the consumption. Further, consumption of cultural apparel perfectly mediated the influence of strength of ethnic identification on consumers' attributions of emotions, and partially mediated this influence on consumers' attributions of meanings.

The study provides valuable implications for channeling apparel product development, merchandising, and retailing to better meet the emotional needs and preferences of ethnic consumers. The main limitation of this study is the use of a non‐representative sample.

Prior research on ethnic consumers' motivations in consuming cultural products is limited. This study fills this gap in the literature at a time when large retailers are seeking to attract ethnic consumers through culturally targeted apparel products and brands.