A Temporal Model of Perceived Control to Explain Service Failures

Abstract Research on service failure has neglected the temporal dimension of consumer-perceived control (i.e., past, present and future control). This paper introduces the temporal model of perceived control to service research and compares its explanatory power for consumers’ emotional and behavioural reactions after a service failure to that of the causal attribution model. The results of a correlational study show that the temporal model of perceived control has greater explanatory power than the causal attribution model (i.e., the former can better predict consumers’ regret, self-focused anger, and repurchase behaviour after a stressful service episode). This is the first empirical research to use a temporal model of perceived control to explain consumer reactions after service failures, showing that this model may be combined with others in a complementary way to provide a better understanding of consumer reactions.