What this publication covers
Examines how employees’ physical attractiveness affects satisfaction, perceived quality, and liking during service encounters. Perceived social distance helps explain the effect, which also varies with customers’ own perceived attractiveness and beliefs about this trait.
How this reference can help
Use as a theoretical foundation for discussing experiência, encontros de serviço e jornadas.
Curated by Ricardo Martins
View the original abstract 🇺🇸 🇬🇧
Physical attractiveness is an essential factor in consumers' evaluation processes during a service encounter. Using both experimental and field study designs, we demonstrate that a service representative's physical attractiveness affects consumer response (i.e., customer satisfaction, service quality perception, and likability of the service representative). Also, we find that a consumer's social distance perception between themselves and a service representative mediates the physical attractiveness eff ect on consumer response. Thus, this article is the first to demonstrate that social distance perception is an underlining mechanism of the physical attractiveness eff ect. Furthermore, findings from Studies 2 and 3 show that consumers' physical attractiveness and their attractive- ness-ability belief moderate the physical attractiveness eff ect. Although contentious to some, our findings in- dicate that the recruitment of attractive representatives may be an eff ective business practice in service settings. However, managers should not regard consumers as a homogeneous group; self-perceived unattractive con- sumers may respond negatively to their service representative's physical attractiveness.