How employees respond to customer anger and sadness: emotional reciprocity and recovery strategies in service failures

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Sadness and anger are among the most commonly experienced and expressed negative customer emotions in service failure encounters, yet their differential interpersonal effects on frontline employees remain underexplored. To address this gap, this study examines employees’ emotional and behavioral responses to customer sadness versus anger expressions, drawing on appraisal theory. Through two scenario-based experiments, we find that in the primary appraisal stage, employees experience other-concern emotions (such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion) in response to sad customers, and reciprocal anger in response to angry customers. In the secondary appraisal stage, employees strategically translate these emotions into recovery behaviors. Specifically, employees exert more spontaneous extra-role recovery effort for sad customers, whereas they provide comparable levels of mandatory in-role recovery for sad and angry customers. These findings contribute to the emotion literature on customer-employee interactions in service contexts, and offer valuable insights for service recovery management in the hospitality industry.