You are Forgiven: Cause Uncontrollability and Negative Emotional Contagion

The role of emotions displayed by customer contact employees for customer emotions has received increasing attention in recent consumer behavior literature. Several studies find that customers tend to catch positive (Howard and Gengler 2001; Luong 2005; Pugh 2001) and negative emotions (Barsade 2002; Dallimore, Sparks, and Butcher 2007; Du, Fan, and Feng 2011) experienced by frontline employees––a phenomenon referred to as emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994). While the majority of research in this area has focused on which emotions are caught by customers (e.g., happy service display; Howard and Gengler 2001), fairly little is known about boundary conditions of emotional contagion. Against this background, we explore how customers catch negative emotions of employees and how customers’ attributions for these negative emotions impact the extent of emotional contagion. Specifically, we propose that the extent of emotional contagion depends on whether customers can attribute causes for the negative emotional display as uncontrollable by the customer contact employee.