When Culturally Adaptive Service Behaviors Affect Customer Satisfaction in Shared Ethnicity Service Encounters

This research applies a service adaptation framework to examine how the interplay of employee service adaptive behaviors and customer cultural factors influence customer satisfaction. The results show that stronger ethnic identification increased the positive effect of interpersonal adaptive service (but not service offering-adaptive) behaviors and customer satisfaction. Additionally, stronger in-group favoritism expectations strengthened the positive relationship between service-offering adaptive behaviors (but not interpersonal-adaptive behavior) and satisfaction. These findings contribute to the ethnic services marketing literature by shedding light on the factors that impact customer satisfaction in shared ethnicity service encounters. Implications for research and practice are discussed.