“Service with a smile” and emotional contagion: A replication and extension study

Annals of Tourism Research 80 (2020) 102850

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“Service with a smile” and emotional contagion: A replication and extension study

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Ka-shing Woo , Bobbie Chan Lee Shau Kee School of Business and Administration, The Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong

A R T IC LE I N F O

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Associate Editor: Sara Dolnicar

The “service with a smile” mantra has been universally proclaimed in the West for its enhanced effect on customer affect and service outcomes. It is replicated in Chinese culture and extended to include repeated down-nods as a prevailing but under-researched social cue. Results of an experimental study with 259 ethnic Chinese millennials show that frontline service employee's smile-nod coupling drives both nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior which in turn promote employee-customer rapport. However, post-encounter customer affect does not play a part in emotional contagion. Together, these findings suggest that tourism businesses should attend to both smiling and nodding in service delivery and make concerted efforts more on service outcomes than on positive customer affectivity.

Keywords: Emotional labor Emotional contagion Smiling Nodding Chinese

Introduction When McDonald's entered into the Soviet Union in 1990, they had to train the local staff how to smile. Almost three decades later, the Russian Railways and Moscow Metro conducted more-smile training for their staff ahead of the 2018 World Cup (BBC News Report, 2018). For years, Thailand has been using the tagline of “The Land of Smiles” to promote its tourism industry. A cursory scan of the tourism literature also paints a similar picture on the power of smile. A narration by a couple about their travel experience as urban tourists in Budapest highlighted that “the people [there] are still non-western … people don't smile” (Rickly-Boyd & MetroRoland, 2010, p. 1175). Carnicelli-Filho (2013) studied the trajectory of emotional life of adventure guides in New Zealand and found that one of them “used his abilities to make people laugh and smile as a technique to communicate with and charm girls, enhancing his guiding status” (p. 204). In a similar fashion, Cheng and Zhang (2019) captured the essence of smiling as one of the crucial ritualistic behaviors between a Western host and Chinese guest in a peer-to-peer accommodation scenario. These anecdotes and research findings abounded in the tourism industry show how the “service with a smile” brought about by the West is epidemically adopted by organizations and influences how their frontline service employees behave in other parts of the world. Frontline service employees, being the link between tourism service providers and customers, are regarded as a key factor in service design and co-creating value with customers during service encounter (Carnicelli-Filho, 2013). As emotional labor, the frontline staff are required to maintain and to comply with specific rules and social norms in displaying the desired emotions when interacting with customers (Hochschild, 1983; Ladkin, 2011). A major research stream studying the desired emotional display behaviors of frontline service employees and customer responses is through the lens of emotional contagion (i.e., the phenomenon whereby emotions travel from one person to another suggested by Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1994)). The ability of service

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Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K.-s. Woo), [email protected] (B. Chan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2019.102850 Received 7 May 2019; Received in revised form 21 October 2019; Accepted 10 December 2019 0160-7383/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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employees to infect others with their positive emotions is considered an asset as it not only reflects an employee's emotional competence (Matute, Palau-Saumell, & Viglia, 2018), but also helps enhance work performance (Verbeke, 1997) and establish employeecustomer rapport (Hennig-Thurau, Groth, Paul, & Gremler, 2006). Though the significant role of smiling and emotional contagion during interpersonal service interaction has been heavily stressed in extant literature, related studies examining other culture-specific nonverbal cues are lacking. In this study, we aim to contribute to the tourism literature in three aspects. First, we replicate the Western smiling behavior and extend to include nodding as a prevailing social cue in Chinese culture in studying emotional contagion. Past studies show that the interaction between a frontline service employee and a customer involves more nonverbal than verbal behaviors (Knapp, Hall, & Horgan, 2014), and most studies of emotional contagion tend to focus on frontline service employees' dominant nonverbal markers, such as smiling (e.g., Barger & Grandey, 2006; Ustrov, Valverde, & Ryan, 2016). The “service with a smile” mantra has become a job requirement (Rydzik, Pritchard, Morgan, & Sedgley, 2017) and cornerstone of mainstream tourism marketing practice (Carnicelli-Filho, 2013) in the West. However, there are study findings showing that people in certain parts of Asia are more prone to engage in head-nodding (Nori, Lipi, & Nakano, 2011). Chinese are also found to use more repeated down-nods than their Swedish counterparts (Lu, Allwood, & Ahlsén, 2011). Therefore, the efficacy of both the Western smiling behavior and Chinese repeated down-nods in the process of emotional contagion is to be found out in this study. Second, our study contributes to research on the role of customer affect in the process of emotional contagion. As afore-mentioned, the smiling behavior has been hailed as an important nonverbal marker for emotional contagion. Whilst some studies show that an employee's smiling behavior enhances customer positive affect (e.g., Ustrov et al., 2016), conflicting findings are found in some others (e.g., Barger & Grandey, 2006). Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) also challenge that it is not the extent of smiling, but its authenticity, that triggers customers' positive affectivity. The inconclusive results can be a stumbling block to tourist businesses in drawing inferences on prioritizing their resources towards promoting customer affect or service outcomes. Another goal of this study is therefore to investigate the issue of authenticity and the role of customer affect during the emotional contagion process. Last, we use a scenario-based and role-playing experimental study with ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong to examine the above two issues, as a response to tourism researchers who call for an experimental research design to tap deeper into tourist decision-making strategies (McCabe, Li, & Chen, 2016) and to enable causal conclusions to be drawn (Dolnicar & Ring, 2014). Ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong have been found to closely share a Confucian and collectivistic Chinese culture with their mainland Chinese counterparts (Cheung & Kwok, 1999; Sun, 2008). Results of this study not only add to our understanding of an employee's emotional display at work, but should also provide managerial implications for tourism businesses and service providers on the fascinating nonverbal communication realm in both Western and Chinese perspectives. In the following sections, we first revisit the concept of emotional labor and the role of emotional contagion, and then address the issue of authenticity and its connection with frontline service employees' nonverbal behavior in the process of service delivery. Next, we explore customer responses towards frontline service employees' nonverbal behavior. A conceptual model and related hypotheses will then be developed. We use data collected through an experimental study using Chinese students in Hong Kong with experience in outbound travel services to test these hypotheses. Finally, we explicate the results, offer managerial implications, and propose directions for future research. Literature review Emotional labor and emotional contagion In services, frontline service employees are expected or required to display positive emotion when interacting with their customers. Most of the relevant concepts, theories, and practices are embraced in the literature of emotional labor. The term “emotional labor” was coined by Hochschild (1983) and refers to the regulation of emotion at work by mostly frontline service employees in order to fulfill the organizational requirement of emotional display. In general, organizational display requirements are either implicitly or explicitly communicated to frontline service employees for expressing positive affect and suppressing negative affect when interacting with customers. In response to these emotional display requirements, they have to perform as actors on stage by employing two principal acting strategies: surface acting (faking the required emotional display and engaging in negative affect suppression) and deep acting (actually feeling the emotions and engaging in positive affect expression) (see the work of Grandey, Diefendorff, and Rupp (2013), for a review). The concept of emotional labor has also been widely discussed and studied in both the tourism and hospitality literature (see Lee and Madera (2019), for a recent review). For instance, Ladkin (2011) terms it as tourism labor who is required to stage a performance to enact his or her scripted role when interacting with tourists. Similarly, adventure guides engage in acting in order to make their clients laugh and smile when co-creating travel experiences (Carnicelli-Filho, 2013). Besides studying emotional labor from a frontline service employee's perspective, another significant research stream focuses on emotional contagion to test whether customers or tourists are infected by the frontline service employees' positive or negative emotions (e.g., Verbeke, 1997). This research stream provides tourism researchers and practitioners with significant insight as tourist emotional reaction is one of the key determinants of tourist attitude, satisfaction, and loyalty (Hosany & Prayag, 2014). The subject of emotional contagion originates from the work of Hatfield et al. (1994) when they define it as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (p. 5). These facial expressions, vocalizations, and movements can be made by means of smiling (Barger & Grandey, 2006), making small talk with the customer (Luong, 2005), and using fingers for grabbing food (Du, Fan, 2

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& Feng, 2011). Primitive emotional contagion goes through mimicry of others' emotional expressions and through facial feedbacks, “catch” the experience of the same emotions. It is probable that mimicry of one's emotional expression is only an acknowledgement of that emotion, without actually feeling the affect in the contagion process (Hess & Blairy, 2001). Indeed, emotional contagion extends beyond the mere exposure to another person's emotional states (i.e., primitive emotional contagion) as revealed by Schoenewolf (1990) who signifies it as “a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes” (p. 50). Studies conducted in different service contexts suggest a more complex process than was originally proposed and the findings tend to be contradictory. For example, Pugh (2001) found that “service with a smile” by banking service employees enhances customers' positive affect, whereas Barger and Grandey (2006) failed to find support for the association between employee smiling and customer affect in a restaurant setting. The findings of a simulated experiment by Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) highlight that it is not the extent of smiling, but its authenticity, enhances customers' emotions. The tripartite relationship among emotional contagion, nonverbal behaviors, and authenticity of these nonverbal behaviors warrants further probe as to how the construct of authenticity is manifested in nonverbal behavior during the process of emotional contagion. They will be further discussed below. Authenticity and nonverbal behavior In her work on emotional labor, Hochschild (1983) started by stating that “the engineering of a managed heart is not unknown to socialism” (p. 11) and then ended with a concluding remark that “the more the heart is managed, the more we value the unmanaged heart” (p. 192). The tug of war between what should be managed and unmanaged by frontline service employees is of no easy task. The “unmanaged heart” signifies the authenticity of emotion that underlies the perspective-taking of frontline service employees by putting themselves into the shoes of their customers. This is resonated by Moutinho, Ballantyne, and Rate (2014), when futurecasting the tourism industry, that there will be a greater demand for emotional authenticity than before by tourist customers when they seek more emotional value from tourism products. In recent years, researchers working in a remarkable array of tourism and business disciplines have taken an intense interest in questions concerning authenticity. In the context of tourism, for example, Ye, Xiao, and Zhou (2018) define authenticity as “the extent to which guests perceive their relationships with the hosts that are natural, friendly, and authentic” (p. 42) when studying commercial homes. Similarly, in a myriad of sources in marketing and management, the construct of authenticity is conceptualized in different ways. Roberts, Cha, Hewlin, and Settles (2009) define authenticity as “the subjective experience of alignment between one's internal experiences and external expressions” (p. 151). It may also be considered as an outcome of skilled impression management (Grandey, Fisk, Mattila, Jansen, & Sideman, 2005), and as something defined by what other people attribute to a person since one cannot be authentic on his or her own (Goffee & Jones, 2005). The “defined-by-others” definition of authenticity coincides with the study of Groth, Hennig-Thurau, and Walsh (2009) who found that inauthentic behavior, in particular nonverbal behavior, may not be a problem when customers are not able to detect it. Despite the increased interest in “authenticity,” the manifestation of authenticity in service encounter remains to be a rather complicated one and may not be readily well captured by the existing definitions. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that nonverbal behavior plays a significant role in shaping the level of perceived authenticity (e.g., Grandey et al., 2005). Nonverbal behavior is also called nonverbal immediacy behavior in order to reflect the directness and intensity of an interaction between two parties (Mehrabian, 1967). Smiling is probably the most widely studied facial expression of emotion in the West because it is perceived as a way to reflect happiness and to convey warmth and positive interest (Cuddy, Glick, & Beninger, 2011). In some parts of Asia, or Chinese culture in particular, it is not smiling, but nodding, that matters most in interpersonal relationship (Lu et al., 2011; Maynard, 1987). Taking into account the undue focus of smiling as dominant physiological marker in promoting authenticity and immediacy in the West, and the prevailing use of nodding in Chinese culture, we consider both nonverbal cues in this study, which will be explicated further in the following sections. Smiling As broadly discussed in tourism literature, frontline service employees are recruited and trained to “put on a sweet smile” (Rydzik et al., 2017, p. 18). What makes a smile sweet? In the history of smile research in the West, different types of smile have been distinguished based on their intensity, duration, and symmetry of facial muscle activities (Ekman & Friesen, 1982). Of particular importance is the Duchenne smile, named after Guillaume Duchenne who pioneered in researching facial expression of emotions in the 18th century. Duchenne smile refers to the genuine expression of happiness and enjoyment when subjects are processing positive affect stimuli. It is characterized by the simultaneous activation of muscles that induces the mouth widely opened, raises the cheeks, and creates wrinkles at the eye corners. This set of muscle activation is found to be consistent with pattern of brain activity that governs positive emotion (Ekman & Davidson, 1993). Duchenne smile has rigorously drawn interest from researchers seeking to increase the understanding of the mind-body connection. Throughout the nonverbal communication literature, Duchenne smile is described as felt smile (Ekman & Friesen, 1982), enjoyment smile (Fox & Davidson, 1988), and spontaneous smile (Gunnery & Hall, 2015). Duchenne smile is found to have predictive validity with a host of positive qualities and consequences, including feeling of positive affect (Mehu, Grammer, & Dunbar, 2007), cooperation by others (Johnston, Miles, & Macrae, 2010), and customer satisfaction (Grandey et al., 2005). Non-Duchenne smile, put simply, is false smile (Ekman & Friesen, 1982) and can be linked to any kinds of emotion, including negative emotion to be concealed (Guerrero & Floyd, 2006). In a review of smile literature, Gunnery and Hall (2015) highlight the major differences between Duchenne 3

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and non-Duchenne smiles. Duchenne smile has less variability in duration (e.g., about 1 s to 5 s as in the study by Frank, Ekman, and Friesen (1993)) and at the same time is of smoother quality (i.e., less abrupt or irregular onset and offset of muscle movements shown in Ekman and Friesen's (1982) study) than non-Duchenne smile. These facial muscle activation features and patterns provide additional inputs to how Duchenne smile is manipulated in this experimental study. Nodding Compared to the voluminous smiling studies, head movement is under-researched in service literature, let alone tourism research. In the nonverbal communication literature, head nod is not only a nonverbal indicator of mindful listening suggesting that the listener is paying attention (Fruzzetti & Iverson, 2004), but also a form of supportiveness (Knapp et al., 2014). Although vertical head nod generally represents part of the conversational rhythm (Erickson & Shultz, 1982), there is mounting evidence showing that it has different functions across cultures. In Japanese culture, nodding means that the listener is paying attention and nothing more (Martin & Nakayama, 2014). Similar interpretation is also made by Chinese who use nodding to acknowledge the speaker than to agree to the subject matter (Samovar, Porter, & McDaniel, 2007). Likewise, Nam (2015) also regards a head nod as simply a supportive listening cue than an agreement in a high context culture (e.g., China) when comparing the same behavior in a low context culture (US). Apart from the cultural differences in perceiving head nod, the kinesics flow of head nod is also under microscopic examination by researchers (see Givens (2015), for a review of relevant gestures). In their study of head nodding cue, Nori et al. (2011) found that Japanese subjects tend to engage in single head nod, compared to repeated head nods of their German counterparts. Wilbur (2000) differentiates between “large and slow” and “small and rapid” head nods in that the former indicates agreement or commitment to an assertion, whereas the latter suggests the other way round. Based on limited evidence, Chinese are found to engage in more repeated down-nods than Swedish (Lu et al., 2011). A more frequent use of head nods was also found among people with lower socioeconomic status (Kraus & Keltner, 2009). Potentially, these findings may lend support to the ubiquity of head nod in a hierarchy-based Chinese culture. These features of head nodding will be accounted for in our experimental manipulation. On the basis of the preceding review on smiling and nodding, we expect that Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods help promote perceptions of nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior when frontline service employees interact with their Chinese customers. Therefore, the following two hypotheses are proposed: Hypothesis 1. (H1). Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods of frontline service employees will have an interaction effect on nonverbal immediacy as perceived by their Chinese customers. That is, when a higher level of Duchenne smile is present, a higher level of repeated down-nods will more likely lead to a significant increase in nonverbal immediacy than a lower level of repeated down-nods. Hypothesis 2. (H2). Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods of frontline service employees will have an interaction effect on authenticity of service encounter behavior as perceived by their Chinese customers. That is, when a higher level of Duchenne smile is present, a higher level of repeated down-nods will more likely lead to a significant increase in authenticity of service encounter behavior than a lower level of repeated down-nods. Customer affect and service evaluation In the discussion of positive emotional expressions and their perceived authenticity, research has mostly geared towards frontline service employees (as agents) and their targets (e.g., customers) (Barger & Grandey, 2006; Groth, Hennig-Thurau, & Wang, 2013). When a frontline service employee interacts with a customer, an increased use of positive expressive behavior (i.e., a higher level of Duchenne smile or repeated down-nods in this study) leads to nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior as perceived by customer, both of which should have a direct positive impact on employee-customer rapport (Andersen, 1985). The role of rapport is a major construct in emotional contagion literature and denotes an enjoyable employee-customer interaction (Gremler & Gwinner, 2000). For example, in their experimental study, Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) found that deep acting (or perspective-taking) of frontline service employees leads to a higher degree of employee-customer rapport as perceived by their customers. Umasuthan, Park, and Ryu (2017) also support that establishing friendliness in an employee-customer interaction is a key technique for nurturing comfortable feelings for leisure hotel guests. The role of rapport may also have particular relevance to Chinese culture because rapport is closely related to the defining features of harmony for relationship promotion (Leung, Brew, Zhang, & Zhang, 2011). Therefore, we hypothesize: Hypothesis 3. (H3). Nonverbal immediacy is positively associated with employee-customer rapport. Hypothesis 4. (H4). Authenticity of service encounter behavior is positively associated with employee-customer rapport. In addition to examining the direct effects of nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior on employeecustomer rapport, it is also the objective of this study to delve into the conscious emotional contagion effect (Schoenewolf, 1990) on employee-customer rapport through post-encounter customer affect. As afore-mentioned, emotion regulation is an integral part of emotional labor, and frontline service employees are required to manage their feelings and emotional display behaviors in order to produce changes in affective states of their customers (Hochschild, 1983). Consistent with this centerpiece, past studies indicated that positive emotional display of frontline service employees enhances customer mood (Pugh, 2001; Ustrov et al., 2016) through the effect of primitive emotional contagion (i.e., simply “catching” the emotion or mood). The positive effects of emotional labor in 4

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Employee nonverbal behavior

Emotional contagion and customer responses

H3

Duchenne smile

H1

Nonverbal immediacy H5 Post-encounter customer affect

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Employeecustomer rapport

H6 Repeated down-nods

H2

Authenticity of service encounter behavior

H4

Fig. 1. A conceptual model of employee nonverbal behavior and customer responses.

tourism are evident. For example, Carnicelli-Filho (2013) shows that the performing of emotional labor by adventure guides reaps the benefits of creating happiness for tourists and thus generating a greater potential for monetary gain. However, some other research evidence highlights that conscious emotional contagion (Schoenewolf, 1990) is at play when customers actively undertake cognitive appraisal of the employees' positive emotional display (Groth et al., 2013). For example, Grandey et al. (2005) in their study of hotel and restaurant services found that display authenticity directly impacts customer satisfaction. Similarly, Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) found that customer affect is dependent more on authenticity than the extent of emotional display behavior. In other words, perception of nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior is a critical pre-condition for arousing positive customer affectivity which will ultimately lead to employee-customer rapport. We therefore propose the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 5. (H5). Post-encounter customer affect mediates the relationship between nonverbal immediacy and employeecustomer rapport. Hypothesis 6. (H6). Post-encounter customer affect mediates the relationship between authenticity of service encounter behavior and employee-customer rapport. All hypotheses are depicted in a conceptual model shown in Fig. 1. Method Stimuli development In past studies involving emotional display behavior, researchers tended to use a scenario-based and role-playing experimental design for ecological validity and control over confounding effects (Dallimore, Sparks, & Butcher, 2007). Accordingly, this type of experimental design was adopted in our study of nonverbal cues. In order to reduce possible bias arising from same-gender or opposite-gender dyads in service encounter interactions (Khan, Ro, Gregory, & Hara, 2016), we developed a total of eight video vignettes for this between-subjects quasi-experiment: Duchenne smile (high extent vs. low extent) and repeated down-nods (high extent vs. low extent) for both male service employee and female service employee. In the video vignettes, the service encounter took place when the customer visited the travel agency to purchase a vacation package to Thailand and met the travel manager. In developing the required video vignettes, we sought advice on and assistance in three issues from an academic in film studies at a local university. The first issue was script-writing. Three script-writers were recruited. They observed and experienced the related service at a local travel agency so as to make the script a real portrait of service encounter. The draft was reviewed and modified for a few times by the film academic and two researchers in service management from a local university. The second issue was the composition of the crew. Two professional actors (one male and one female) and a team of final-year undergraduate students currently studying cinematic design and digital art at a local university were hired. Both actors were selected based on their experience and the actual audition performance in exhibiting the required non-verbal behaviors, whereas the student crew members were selected for specialized skills in lighting, filming, and video-editing. The actors were also reminded to take the customer's perspective and to internalize the feelings involved in showing and projecting a genuine Duchenne smile (i.e., with cheeks raised, teeth showing, and wrinkles around the eye corners). In addition, the actors attended to (1) maintain natural onset and offset of 5

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muscle movement for Duchenne smile and (2) avoid “small and rapid” head nods. They worked on script rehearsal practicing the coordinated Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods for a week before actual filming. The last issue was the filming of the simulated service encounter. Unlike some of the studies which used videotaping service encounters in a real service setting (Grandey et al., 2005), the required video vignettes were filmed in a studio at a local university. The actors were filmed against a green background in the studio. They took turn to be the travel manager and the customer (e.g., when the male actor performed as the travel manager, the female actor would be the customer). As for the screen layout, the customer's back and one shoulder were shown at the left hand side of the screen, occupying about one fourth of the screen. The customer's engagement in the conversation with the travel manager was about 20 s in a two-minute duration, leaving ample room for displaying manipulated behaviors (i.e., Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods) by the travel manager. The travel manager was filmed waist up with his or her face closed up in the middle of the screen. In order to ensure that the video vignettes were a representation of reality, subsequent video-editing work was conducted, such as replacing the green colored background used in the video by a slightly blurred background image of a travel agency and adding background noise. Final edited version of the eight video vignettes was then reviewed by the film academic and two other marketing academics with relevant experience to ensure their face validity before recruiting experiment participants. Participants and procedures This experimental study was conducted between September and December in 2016. The participants were ethic Chinese millennials in Hong Kong studying full-time undergraduate business programs at a local university. Prior to the study, they all indicated that they had service encounter experience with travel agents about overseas travelling. Students participated in the experiment in groups before attending their tutorials. The eight video vignettes were randomly assigned to different student groups. At the start of the experiment, participants were briefed on the objectives of promoting tourism industry. They were then asked to fill in the first part of the questionnaire that was used to collect demographic data and information on respondents' state of affectivity (i.e., preencounter customer affect) before watching the video. After viewing the two-minute video, all participants were required to respond to a number of questions regarding the attractiveness of actor who acted as the travel manager, realism check, and manipulation checks, together with outcome responses (i.e., post-encounter customer affect, nonverbal immediacy, authenticity of service encounter behavior, and employee-customer rapport). The entire process of data collection took about 15 min. A total of 259 participants, spanning across eight groups that varied in size between 22 and 42, gave consent and participated in the experiment. The responses of these participants were then combined in accordance with the four experimental conditions, ranging in size between 51 and 76. The sample consisted of 84 males and 175 females. The high proportion of female participants is not surprising given the fact that the female student population in business programs of that local university in general tends to be higher. On average, participants aged 23 (SD = 4.5) and with 3 years of working experience (SD = 3.3). Measures The questionnaire that was used in the experiment included measures of nonverbal immediacy, authenticity of service encounter behavior, pre- and post-encounter customer affect, and employee-customer rapport, together with a number of items regarding the attractiveness of actors, realism check, and manipulation checks. We screened and selected items from established scales based on their content validity in relation to our study need, ease of understanding, and length of the questionnaire. All items were measured on a seven-point bipolar rating scale (1 = “strongly disagree” and 7 = “strongly agree”). Frontline service employee's nonverbal immediacy, according to Andersen and Andersen (2005), signifies that “[t]he more immediate a person is, the more likely he/she is to communicate at close distances, smile, engage in eye contact, use direct body orientations, use overall body movement and gestures, touch others, relax and be vocally expressive. In other words, we might say that an immediate person is perceived as overtly friendly and warm” (p. 123). The original generalized immediacy scale from the relevant work of Andersen and Andersen (2005) used in assessing the interpersonal conversational style was modified to measure nonverbal immediacy behavior in this study. Three items were selected and modified in the context of a service encounter. As mentioned, the concept of authenticity represents the alignment between one's internal experiences and external expressions (Roberts et al., 2009), we found that the measures used by Winsted (1997) to study how customers evaluated authenticity and civility of service encounter behavior were relevant to our current study. Since the original paper did not list out the particular items pertaining to our study, we made reference to the work of Bruner, James, and Hensel (2001) who obtained the measures through personal correspondence with the researcher. For employee-customer rapport, it is characterized by “an enjoyable interaction in which participants connect on some level” (Gremler & Gwinner, 2000, p. 90). In the original scale of customer-employee rapport that was used by Gremler and Gwinner (2000), there were two dimensions (i.e., enjoyable interaction and personal connection) consisting of 11 items in total. Three out of six items in the enjoyable interaction dimension suggesting harmonious and positive relationship were considered relevant and modified for use in this study. Pre- and post-encounter customer affect relating to subjective feeling states (Luong, 2005) were both measured by three items selected from the study of emotional contagion by Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006). The realism of the scenario was measured by three items borrowed from McColl-Kennedy, Daus, and Sparks (2003). To ensure the equivalence in physical attractiveness of the two actors, three items from Feick and Higie (1992) were used. All the above measures are shown in the Appendix. 6

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Results Manipulation checks As for the realism of the scenario measured on a 7-point scale, the mean rating was high at 5.21 (SD = 0.99), suggesting that the simulated service encounter was indeed realistic. To examine the attractiveness effect of frontline service employees, an independent sample t-test was used to ensure that the attractiveness of both female and male actors, as shown in the simulated service encounter, was on a par with one another. The results suggest that they were physically attractive to the same extent (male: M = 3.55, SD = 1.28; female: M = 3.51, SD = 1.11; t(259) = 0.31, p = 0.76). In relation to the experimental stimuli, two items on a 7-point scale (i.e., rare/always and a little/a lot) were used to measure the extent of both the Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods of the travel manager. Composite scores were then used to check for manipulations. We ran 2 (Duchenne smile: high extent vs. low extent) × 2 (repeated down-nods: high extent vs. low extent) ANOVAs. The respondents in the high-extent Duchenne smile condition reported higher frequency of Duchenne smile (M = 5.32, SD = 1.01) than those in the low-extent Duchenne smile condition (M = 3.37, SD = 1.20; F(1, 257) = 201.65, p < 0.01), whereas the respondents in the high-extent repeated down-nod condition reported a higher frequency of repeated down-nods (M = 5.09, SD = 0.93) than those in the low-extent repeated down-nod condition (M = 4.03, SD = 0.95; F(1, 257) = 77.99, p < 0.01). Our manipulations might have cross effects in the way that Duchenne smile may induce repeated down-nods, and vice versa. As shown by effect sizes in terms of partial η2, these cross-effect sizes (0.01 for both Duchenne smile and down-nods) together with interaction-effect sizes (0.00 and 0.01 respectively) were much smaller in magnitude than the main-effect sizes of the focal nonverbal behavior (0.44 and 0.24 for Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods respectively). Therefore, being consistent with the recommendations by Perdue and Summers (1986), the results of manipulation checks for this study are considered to be satisfactory. Measurement results Descriptive statistics and correlations among the constructs are shown in Table 1. Fitness of the measurement model was assessed by means of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on all constructs (i.e., nonverbal immediacy, authenticity of service encounter behavior, pre- and post-encounter customer affect, and employee-customer rapport). The measurement model provided a good fit of the data (χ2 (80) = 190.23, p < 0.01; GFI = 0.91; RMSEA = 0.07). Construct reliability (CR: composite reliability and AVE: average variance extracted) and validity were then assessed. In assessing measurement reliability, all CRs (ranging between 0.88 and 0.94) and AVEs (ranging between 0.72 and 0.85) met the required thresholds of 0.60 and 0.50 respectively. In terms of convergent validity, all factor loadings ranged from 0.78 to 0.96 and were all statistically significant (p < 0.01). For the test of discriminant validity, all AVEs were greater than the squared correlations between the constructs and any others, suggesting discriminant validity of the measures. Overall, the results provide evidence of construct reliability and validity for the measures used in this study. Hypotheses testing In testing the hypotheses of H1 and H2, a two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed for the dependent variables of nonverbal immediacy (H1) and authenticity of service encounter behavior (H2) respectively, with participant gender (because of biased sample towards female sub-sample) and customer pre-encounter affect as covariates. The results of ANCOVAs are shown in Table 2. Caution should be taken because the effect size is almost negligible. Similar issue is also evidenced in related studies (e.g., Goldberg & Grandey, 2007). In relation to nonverbal immediacy, the results showed a significant main effect for Duchenne smile (F(1, 253) = 20.01, p < 0.01, partial η2 = 0.07). Customers perceive a higher degree of frontline service employee's nonverbal immediacy in the highextent Duchenne smile condition than in the low-extent Duchenne smile condition. For repeated down-nods, the main effect was insignificant (F(1, 253) = 0.63, p = 0.43, partial η2 = 0.00). However, these main effects were qualified by a significant Duchenne smile × repeated down-nods interaction effect (F(1, 253) = 4.81, p < 0.05, partial η2 = 0.02) as depicted in Fig. 2 (Panel A). It shows that in the high-extent Duchenne smile condition, customers perceived a higher degree of nonverbal immediacy when the Table 1 Descriptive statistics, reliability, and correlations.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Participant gender (1 = M, 2 = F) Pre-encounter customer affect Post-encounter customer affect Non-verbal immediacy Authenticity of service encounter behavior Employee-customer rapport

M

SD

1

2

3

4

5

6

– 4.26 3.99 4.60 4.29 4.79

– 1.21 1.13 1.02 1.06 0.97

– −0.17⁎⁎ −0.03 −0.03 0.06 0.03

(0.92) 0.55⁎⁎ 0.19⁎⁎ 0.15⁎ 0.12

(0.94) 0.35⁎⁎ 0.33⁎⁎ 0.28⁎⁎

(0.91) 0.58⁎⁎ 0.67⁎⁎

(0.88) 0.55⁎⁎

(0.92)

Notes: n = 261. Values in parentheses along the diagonal are Cronbach's alpha reliabilities. ⁎ Significant at p < 0.05. ⁎⁎ Significant at p < 0.01. 7

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Table 2 Descriptive statistics and ANCOVA results for Duchenne smile (SMILE) and repeated down-nods (NOD). NOD High level M Nonverbal immediacy High level SMILE Low level SMILE Authenticity of service encounter behavior High level SMILE Low level SMILE

Low level

SD

M

ANCOVA (F) SD

SMILE 20.01

5.01 4.20

0.11 0.12

4.65 4.37

0.12 0.14

4.58 4.04

0.12 0.13

4.12 4.29

0.12 0.15

⁎⁎

2.73

NOD

SMILE × NOD

0.63

4.81⁎

0.33

5.88⁎

Notes: Participant gender and pre-encounter customer affect are included as covariates in all analyses. ⁎ Significant at p < 0.05. ⁎⁎ Significant at p < 0.01.

A: SMILE x NOD on Nonverbal immediacy 5.20

Mean rating

5.00 High level NOD

4.80 4.60

Low level NOD

4.40 4.20 4.00 Low level

High level SMILE

B: SMILE x NOD on Authenticity of service encounter behavior 5.20

Mean rating

5.00 4.80 High level NOD 4.60 4.40 Low level NOD

4.20 4.00 Low level

High level SMILE

Fig. 2. Interaction effects of Duchenne smile (SMILE) and repeated down-nods (NOD). Panel A: SMILE × NOD on Nonverbal immediacy Panel B: SMILE × NOD on Authenticity of service encounter behavior

frontline service employee engaged in higher (vs. lower) level of repeated down-nods. Therefore, H1 was supported. For authenticity of service encounter behavior, the main effects for Duchenne smile (F(1, 253) = 2.73, p = 0.10, partial η2 = 0.01) and repeated down-nods (F(1, 253) = 0.33, p = 0.57, partial η2 = 0.00) were insignificant. However, the Duchenne smile × repeated down-nods interaction effect was significant (F(1, 253) = 5.88, p < 0.05, partial η2 = 0.02) as illustrated in Fig. 2 (Panel B). It demonstrates that in the high-extent Duchenne smile condition, customers also perceived a higher degree of authenticity of service encounter behavior when the frontline service employee engaged in higher (vs. lower) level of repeated down-nods. 8

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Table 3 Regression results. Consequent Post-encounter customer affect (M) Antecedent Control variable Participant gender Pre-encounter customer affect Independent variable Post-encounter customer affect Nonverbal immediacy Authenticity of service encounter behavior

Coeff.

0.12 0.47⁎⁎

SE

t

0.12 0.05

Employee-customer rapport (Y) Coeff.

0.97 10.03

– – – 0.07 2.84 0.19⁎⁎ 0.16⁎ 0.07 2.53 R2 = 0.39; F(4, 254) = 41.05, p < 0.01

SE

0.05 −0.03 0.04 0.48⁎⁎ 0.22⁎⁎ R2 = 0.48; F(5,

t

0.10 0.04

0.50 −0.56

0.05 0.80 0.05 8.76 0.05 4.28 253) = 45.88, p < 0.01

Note: M = mediator; Y = outcome. ⁎ Significant at p < 0.05. ⁎⁎ Significant at p < 0.01.

Therefore, H2 was also supported. The hypotheses of H3, H4, H5, and H6 were tested using OLS regression by means of Hayes' (2018) PROCESS macro (v. 3.0) for SPSS. The PROCESS macro allows testing of direct and indirect effects simultaneously in a mediation model. In this study, 10,000 bootstrap resamples and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were used when testing significance of indirect effects. Given the fact that only one predictor variable could be tested at a time, two regression models were run to test the hypotheses about the impact of two predictor variables (i.e., nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior) on outcome variable (i.e., employeecustomer rapport). When nonverbal immediacy was treated as the focal predictor variable, authenticity of service encounter behavior was included in the regression as covariate, and vice versa. Participant gender and pre-encounter customer affect were also included as covariates throughout the regression analyses as in previous ANCOVAs. The regression results are shown in Table 3. Nonverbal immediacy was positively and significantly associated with employee-customer rapport (β = 0.48, p < 0.01) and therefore H3 was supported. Authenticity of service encounter behavior was also found significantly associated with employee-customer rapport (β = 0.22, p < 0.01), thus supporting H4. The indirect effect of nonverbal immediacy on employee-customer rapport through post-encounter customer affect was insignificant (point estimate 0.01; CI: −0.01–0.04) as the bias corrected bootstrap 95% confidence interval for post-encounter customer affect included zero. Similar insignificant result was obtained for the indirect effect of authenticity of service encounter behavior on employee-customer rapport through post-encounter customer affect (point estimate 0.01; CI: −0.02–0.03). These results indicated that both H5 and H6 were not supported. Post-encounter customer affect is not a significant predictor of employee-customer rapport and therefore does not play a mediating role between the two encounter-based perceived assessments (i.e., nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior) and subsequent perception of employee-customer rapport. In other words, the predicted conscious emotional contagion effect is not found among Hong Kong Chinese millennial tourists. Discussion This study contributes to the literature of tourism and emotional contagion by examining (1) the role of Western Duchenne smile, (2) the significance of Chinese repeated down-nods, and (3) whether post-encounter customer affect/mood plays a mediating role in influencing service outcomes through an experimental study with ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong. It helps enrich our understanding of what frontline service employees should manage (i.e., through their nonverbal behavior) and unmanage their hearts (i.e., to project a sense of emotional authenticity) at work. Of particular interest, this study tests if the commonly practiced display rule prevailing in the West, namely “service with a smile”, is also applicable in the Chinese society. Drawing on the divergence of social norms in different cultures, our study is the first to embrace both Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods as nonverbal cues in a tourism context. Our findings show that neither of these two nonverbal cues, but their “symbiotic relationship,” matters among Chinese tourists. More specifically, the interaction between a high extent of Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods is found to result in favorable perception of both nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior which correlates positively with employeecustomer rapport. The significant interaction effect of Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods is not surprising. This is consistent with the Western literature that both smiling and nodding are composite factors of positive indicators of altercentrism (Coker & Burgoon, 1987). That is, the frontline service employee is paying attention and is willing to spend time with the customer when downward head-nods and Duchenne smile represent nonverbal indicators of mindful listening (Fruzzetti & Iverson, 2004) and enjoyment (Fox & Davidson, 1988) respectively. The support of direct effects (1) between nonverbal immediacy and employee-customer rapport and (2) between authenticity of service encounter behavior and employee-customer rapport is in line with the hypotheses. The non-significant mediating role of customer affect between the two encounter-based evaluations (i.e., nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter 9

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behavior) and employee-customer rapport found in this study transforms our understanding of how culture influences customer experience. It has been shown in past studies that the emotional display of frontline service employees through perspective-taking (or deep acting) tends to be authentic and the perceived authenticity will provide customers with social information for reducing ambiguity during service experience (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006). Therefore, post-encounter customer affect should be greater when the observable nonverbal behavior is perceived to be authentic than when it is not. Consequently, customer affect should be positively related to employee-customer rapport. Our study shows that post-encounter customer affect (1) falls short of pre-encounter customer affect and (2) does not play a mediating role. The non-support of the mediating role of customer affect can be conceivably explained by the fact that a change in customer mood does not necessarily produce a change in the perception of employee-customer rapport. Perhaps this is because Chinese are slow to warm up and will only form and develop strong relationships with a person after understanding and trust have been cultivated (Cheng & Zhang, 2019; Sun, 2008). Thus, it can be a slow process before rapport exists between a frontline service employee and a Chinese tourist, in particular when the latter is newly acquired. Managerial implications The study entails important managerial implications. First, attention should be paid to how “service with a smile” is implemented. This involves necessary muscle activation, natural onset and offset of muscle movement, and internalization of feelings when serving customers. Though a smiling employee is the key to successful business, there are some caveats. This is exemplified by the remark of an adventure guide that interacting with clients is “like a show, you get your clients and you put a face on, it's all about clients—you want to keep them happy” (Carnicelli-Filho, 2013, p. 199). It is not easy for frontline employees to maintain a smiling face for a long time. Ladkin (2011) documented a Polish migrant as a tourism worker and found that “she gets tired of always having to be polite and smile all the time when customers are demanding” (p. 1147). Therefore, practitioners should provide recovery activities (e.g., microbreaks and mindfulness training) for employees when implementing the “service with a smile” practice. Second, given the fact that Chinese tourists nowadays are more prone to global influence and Western consumption patterns than ever before as a result of increased digital communication, the role that smile plays in dealing with Chinese tourists has progressively increased and become a necessary, but insufficient, condition for driving service success. In Chinese culture, head-nod represents an indispensable observable expression for acknowledgement (Samovar et al., 2007) and supportive listening (Nam, 2015). To reap the positive multiplier effect of nonverbal communication in Chinese tourism service, we found that repeated down-nods should be used in conjunction with Duchenne smile in employee-customer interactions. Last, we recommend that tourism businesses should prioritize efforts more on service outcomes than on putting Chinese tourists in a good mood. In our study, post-encounter customer affect does not play a role in the emotional contagion process. The managerial implication of this finding aligns closely with what had been proposed by Barger and Grandey (2006) in that service evaluation outcomes (e.g., employee-customer rapport in this study) are more critical than putting customer in a good mood. This means that making Chinese tourists happy does not really promote service quality. The results of our study provide further support for the need of giving greater emphasis to enhance service outcomes (through nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior) rather than to promote customer affectivity in the process of employee recruitment, training, and compensation. Limitations and suggestions for future research Despite significant contributions to the existing literature of tourism and emotional contagion, our study is subject to several limitations that underline some intriguing areas for future research. First, only Duchenne smile and repeated down-nods were tested in this study. Other culturally specific nonverbal social cues were not accounted for. It has been shown that apart from head nodding, Chinese tend to use eyes more as diagnostic cues in decoding the nonverbal message for social intentions than those in individualistic culture (Yuki, Maddux, & Masuda, 2007). Therefore, exploring other culture-specific nonverbal cues is certainly one avenue in future research for expanding the current store of literature. The second limitation is about the role of conscious emotional contagion through positive nonverbal cues. Given the non-confirmation of the mediating role of customer affect between the two positive customer responses (i.e., nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior) and the service encounter outcome (i.e., employee-customer rapport), it is not known whether it is due to the emotional contagion process in a two-minute video that was used in the experiment or due to the highly moderation of emotion in a hierarchy-based Chinese culture (Sun, 2008) which attenuates the role of emotion and therefore emotional contagion. Therefore, unlike the Western model, emotional contagion tends to be unidirectional flowing from Chinese customers (with more power) to frontline service employees (with less power) only, rather than a two-way street. Future studies may shed more light on this aspect. A further limitation concerns with the measures being used in our study. Though we had taken steps to screen, select, and modify measures from past studies to meet the need of the present study, the measures may yet encounter challenges of reliability and validity. As has been shown in recent studies (e.g., Dolnicar & Grün, 2013), the use of seven-point bi-polar rating scale results in lower reliability and therefore hampers validity of study result than other scales (e.g., binary, four-point, or five-point scales). As far as our study is concerned, this unanswered issue should also be further explored. The last limitation is related to the sample. In this study, full-time university students in Hong Kong were used as participants for the experiment. The results of this study may not be generalized to other tourist samples or service settings. This potential limitation merits consideration and future research may use a wider spectrum of samples for broader generalization. 10

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Acknowledgement The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (UGC/FDS16/B07/14). Appendix A. Measures Realism of the scenario (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2003) 1. It is possible to encounter service situations like this in real life. 2. I think there are travel agencies like this in real life. 3. I think there are service situations like this in real life. Physical attractiveness of the frontline service employee (Feick & Higie, 1992) 1. The frontline service employee is physically attractive. 2. The frontline service employee is good looking. 3. The frontline service employee is pretty (or handsome for male frontline service employee). Pre- and post-encounter customer affect (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006) 1. At this moment, I feel peppy. 2. At this moment, I feel enthusiastic. 3. At this moment, I feel excited. Nonverbal Immediacy of frontline service employee (Andersen 1. The nonverbal behavior of the frontline service employee is 2. The nonverbal behavior of the frontline service employee is 3. The nonverbal behavior of the frontline service employee is

& Andersen, 2005) warm. friendly. close.

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