Does It Really Matter? The Impact of Cultural Intelligence on Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in Intercultural Service Encounters

摘要

Over the years, intercultural service encounters (ICSEs), where customers and service employees from different cul-tures interact with each other, have enormously enlarged in the times of the rapid globalization (Stauss and Mang, 1999). Due to culture-bound expectations and perceptions, misunderstandings and problems are likely to arise when customers communicate with a service employee from a dif-ferent cultural background in ICSEs. One could imagine that in any international service settings (e.g., hotels, restaurants, or taxi), service employees' inability for intercultural com-munication effectiveness could diminish cross-cultural interpersonal interactions, causing customer dissatisfaction, or even anger and frustration (Earley and Ang, 2003; Sharma, Tarn, and Kim, 2009). Despite a rich conceptual background on CQ in the literature, empirical evidence of the impact of service employees' CQ on customer satisfaction and loyalty is scant. More specifically, to the best of our knowledge, empirical examinations of the effects of frontline service employees' CQ on customer relationship quality and out-comes in ICSEs in the international service settings are nearly absent. Hence, it is a large deficiency in offering an in-depth investigation into why some service employees are more effective than others in interacting and developing long-term relationships with customers in culturally diverse situations. Our research, therefore, aims to contribute to service research by investigating frontline service employ-ees' CQ as an important psychological constituent of cus-tomer satisfaction and loyalty in ICSEs in the context of the international hospitality industry. In contrast to previous studies, we employ a multilevel approach to examine the dyadic intercultural interactions between frontline service employees and customers at the individual encounter level.