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This study aims to investigate how consumer forgiveness is formed by examining rumination and distraction by consumers in hotel service failures.

Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire in the USA. A total of 371 usable responses were obtained. Anderson and Gerbing’s two-step approach was used to assess the measurement and structural models.

This study suggests that rumination and distraction play significant roles in processing consumer forgiveness. Self-focused rumination and distraction increase consumer forgiveness, whereas provocation-focused rumination exacerbates the negative effects of service failure severity on consumer forgiveness. This study also shows that gender differences exist. Men were more likely than women to link self-focused rumination and distraction to their intentions to forgive a service provider.

This study is helpful for hotel managers to understand the mechanisms of consumer forgiveness in service failures and develop effective recovery strategies. Managers should aim to lessen consumers’ provocation-focused rumination while encouraging self-focused rumination and distraction. In addition, because of the differences in the process of consumer forgiveness between men and women, it is critical to differentiate the two groups in designing targeted recovery strategies for service failures.

This study investigates consumer forgiveness as a behavioral outcome following service failures that may help consumers achieve psychological balance and allow service providers a chance to restore the broken relationship. This study adds new information for understanding consumer responses and provides a basis for effective service management strategies.

How does self-efficacy affect employee well-being? The purpose of this paper is to increase insight in the underlying process between employee self-efficacy and well-being at work (i.e. emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction) by investigating the mediating role of employees’ engagement in reflection and rumination.

A representative sample of the Dutch working population (n=506) filled out an online questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was used to test the measurement model and research model.

As predicted, self-efficacy was significantly related to emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. Rumination mediated the self-efficacy-exhaustion relationship. Reflection did not serve as a mediator; although reflection was predicted by self-efficacy, it was unrelated to exhaustion and job satisfaction.

This cross-sectional study was restricted to self-report measures. Longitudinal research is needed to validate the findings and to further investigate the relationship between reflection and rumination.

Organizations might try to support their employees’ well-being through interventions that strengthen employees’ self-efficacy, and prevent or decrease rumination.

This study increases the understanding of the role of reflection and rumination at work. The findings indicate that self-reflection can have positive as well as negative outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people's gender‐role identities (self‐identified masculinity and femininity) affect their perceptions of the emotional role of the humiliated victim in conflicts (and the norms surrounding the role), and how these perceptions affect the negativity and aggressiveness of their responses and the degree to which they ruminate over conflict and remain hostile over time.

This paper builds on literature on humiliation, aggression, gender, and rumination and presents a correlational scenario study with 96 male graduate students from a large Northeastern University.

Males with high‐masculine gender‐role identities are more likely to perceive the social norms surrounding a humiliating conflictual encounter as privileging aggression, and to report intentions to act accordingly, than males with high‐feminine gender‐role identities. Furthermore, participants are more likely to ruminate about the conflict, and therefore maintain their anger and aggressive intentions a week later, when they perceive the situation to privilege aggression.

This paper sheds light on how aspects of peoples' identities can affect their perceptions of social norms (i.e. whether or not aggression is condoned), and degrees of dysphoric rumination and aggression in conflict. Subsequent research should investigate the social conditions influencing these processes.

Research on the psychology of humiliation has identified it as a central factor in many intractable conflicts. However, this is the first study to begin to specify the nature of this relationship and to investigate it in a laboratory setting.

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and integrate a body of psychological literature regarding an individual difference related to the experience of anxiety that largely, and somewhat surprisingly, has been overlooked by organizational scientists. This variable, most often called social anxiety or social phobia, reflects a strong fear that one is in danger of behaving inappropriately, inadequately, or ineptly, with impending disastrous consequences such as rejection, humiliation, or ouster from a group (Trower & Gilbert, 1990). In providing a summary of the construct and ongoing investigations, the chapter offers ideas for future research into how this important variable may influence behaviors at work.

Despite concerns about the effect of internet addiction, little is known about how psychological suzhi impacts the internet addiction of college students. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between psychological suzhi and internet addiction among college students.

Using the college student psychological suzhi scale and internet addiction test, 2,070 college students from 11 universities in North China, East China, South China and Southwest China were tested.

The detection rate of internet addiction in this college sample of students was 18.8%. There was a significant negative correlation between students’ psychological suzhi and internet addiction (r = −0.408, p < 0.01). Hierarchical regression analysis showed that adaptability and individuality in psychological suzhi significantly negatively predicted college students’ internet addiction tendency (p < 0.001).

This study is the first to show a relationship between psychological suzhi and internet addiction in college students. In detail, the adaptability and individuality of college students’ psychological suzhi are protective factors related to internet addiction. The results also suggested that the authors can prevent and intervene in internet addiction by modifying college students’ adaptability and individuality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of sales manager support in promoting the subjective well‐being of salespeople as well as the function of the sales manager in cultivating positive, motivating and productive environments.

An exploratory assessment of the relationship between sales manager support and emotional health in salespeople was conducted by interviewing sales professionals from diverse industries. The insight offered from these individuals, in conjunction with prior literature, provided the basis for the development of a conceptual model that elucidates the impact of sales manager support on the emotional well‐being of salespeople and subsequently salesperson effectiveness. The model was tested using 154 salespeople. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Results indicate that sales manager support is negatively related to emotional exhaustion and rumination, but positively associated with fostering positive working environments and future expectations. Salesperson motivation is positively related to positive working environments and customer‐oriented selling and negatively related to emotional exhaustion.

The study is cross‐sectional in nature and no causal relationships could be established. Future studies might include field experiments that assess the effect of sales manager support on salesperson's well‐being and behavior.

The study demonstrates the important role sales managers have in promoting the subjective well‐being of salespeople.

This research addresses how sales manager coaching specifically impacts elements of a salesperson's emotional health.

With the increasing use of robots in service scenarios in hospitality industries, service failure frequently occurs during the service process, and consumers may react differently toward humanoid vs. nonhumanoid robots due to different performance expectancies. This study focuses on consumers' reactions to service failures by humanoid vs. nonhumanoid robots and the different impacts on brand forgiveness and revisit intentions through performance expectancy for different genders.

The study used a sample of 280 participants to test the moderated chain mediation model. The participants were instructed to report their performance expectancies for humanoid/nonhumanoid robots and imagine a hotel check-in scenario in which a service failure occurs. Brand forgiveness, brand revisit intention and other demographic information were assessed.

The results show that consumers have higher performance expectancy for nonhumanoid robots. This performance expectancy generates brand forgiveness and revisit intentions for male consumers but does not affect female consumers' forgiveness and revisit behaviors.

This study contributes to the literature by taking a long-term perspective to investigate the outcomes after service failure, providing evidence for pending questions in previous studies and enriching studies of gender differences. Additionally, this study provides practical implications to consider the use of anthropomorphism in robots, advocate for functional confidence in robots and target consumers across genders.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the formation of service perceptions in services that are stressful and unpleasant for customers, e.g. healthcare services. The authors set out to show that customers' happiness, here conceptualized as a stable perception of happiness one has towards one's life, predicts how customers manage adverse services.

The authors conducted a survey in a healthcare setting and analyzed the data with partial least square modeling.

The results show that happiness is indirectly linked, through mood, to perceived service quality, trust and service outcome. Thus, the results suggest that happy consumers are less vulnerable to distress in adverse services.

The findings indicate that, to enable service providers to offer adequate support in adverse service situations, service management would benefit from taking into account different customers' different levels of happiness. It is recommended that providers of adverse services segment their customer base according to the level of happiness and allocate resources to foster trust and expectations to less happy customers that would benefit from more support.

The paper contributes to the service literature by providing an understanding of how service perceptions are formed in adverse service situations. As happiness is relatively stable across time and situations, this study also contributes to understanding the role of personality traits on evaluation.

This research aims to examine the unique emotional distress experienced during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. It explores the role of fear and anxiety, what fueled it and how fear and anxiety impacted consumption and behaviors of conformity and compliance.

An exploratory assessment of the emotions and behaviors of individuals during the early part of the coronavirus outbreak (early March 2020) was conducted by sending a questionnaire to a national panel (n = 42). The insight offered from these individuals, in conjunction with prior literature, provided the basis for the development of a conceptual model that was tested using survey methodology (n = 691).

Both exploratory and empirical research indicate that ruminative thoughts were positively related to feelings of fear and anxiety, whereas trust in leadership was negatively related to fear and anxiety. Feelings of fear and anxiety were also associated with purchasing in large quantities, in compliance with guidelines to slow the spread of the virus and the management of negative feelings through consumption.

Important insight for marketers and public policymakers in how fear and anxiety might be both tempered and mitigated during emergencies is offered.

This research provides new insight into what fuels fear and anxiety during a pandemic and investigates how fear and anxiety impacts consumption and behaviors of conformity and compliance.

Negotiators are offered limited advice on how to overcome adverse events. Drawing on resilience and coping literatures, this study aims to test the impact of three cognitive processing strategies on negotiators’ subjective and economic value following adversity.

Participants completed two negotiations with the same partner. The difficulty of the first negotiation was manipulated and tested how cognitive processing of this experience influenced subjective and economic outcomes in the second negotiation.

Subjective and economic outcomes were predicted by negotiators’ affect, their cognitive processing strategy and negotiation difficulty. In difficult negotiations, as positive affect increased, proactive processing decreased self-satisfaction. As negative affect increased, affective processing increased satisfaction with relationship and process.

Cognitive processing of adversity is most effective when emotions are not running high and better able to protect relationship- and process-oriented satisfaction than outcome-oriented satisfaction. The findings apply to one specific type of adversity and to circumstances that do not generate strong emotions.

This research tests which of three cognitive processing strategies is best able to prevent the aftermath of a difficult negotiation from spilling over into subsequent negotiations. Two forms of proactive processing are more effective than immersive processing in mitigating the consequences.