부정적인 이문화 고객 간 상호작용이 고객 태도에 미치는 영향: 고객의 인지된 문화적 거리감과 종업원의 문화 간 역량의 조절 효과

The objectives of this study is how the negative customer-to-customer cross-cultural interaction influences the customer’s comfortability and intent to return visit, with perceived cultural distance recognized by other culture’s customer and the intercultural competence of employee solving these cultural conflict. The purpose of the study is to make the quality of services in restaurant in the multi-cultural society more higher. Using the scenario technique, this study composes 8 types of form as 2×2×2 combination about the Negative customer to customer cross-cultural interaction (NCC-CCI), which is 2 types of (high, low), and Perceived cultural distance (high, low), Intercultural competence (high, low). Test subjects are adults over 20 residing in south Korea and are to replied the randomly placed survey by offline survey with self-administered questionnaire. The result of survey among restaurant customers shows two main results. Unlike the previous studies, in negative interaction, the cultural distances among the customers from different culture work out as ‘cushion’ of cultural conflicts showing higher comfort than those of lower degree. Secondly, intercultural competence of employee gives comfort to the customers when there is quarrel between customers with divergent cultures. Moreover, intercultural competence of employee may affect positive result of customer’s revisitation. So service providers have to be proactive to solve the negative service encounters conflicts considering the zone of tolerance of customers as cultural distance. We put stress on providing insights based on this result that inter-cultural competence of employee can be superiority to the other companies. This study will help recognize the important of competence in employees. As it is too difficult to reproduce to the cross-cultural situation, we can make the service provider in the negative interaction situation recognize the competence and service ability using the scenario technique. In addition, we will be able to address the implications. When employees settle the cultural differences and conflicts between customers of a different culture, customers will turn their negative emotions into positive comfort. This helps present the implications on the quality of service. We looked into the role of employees in service encounter, and set a strategy to restore situations of negative interactions. Customers tend to recognize the negative feeling from the negative situation. As they tend to focus on the intercultural conditions attributing in cross-cultural encounters and cultural distance, they get a more negative feeling. However, if actions of the employees on the service recovery occur in this situation, the satisfaction of the customer gets higher. Thus service providers need to be more active in handling situations of intercultural encounter. Service employees need to address the service recovery strategy, taking into account the wider permissible levels of the customer (Warden, Liu, Huang, & Lee, 2003) Thus, service employees need to take a variety of training programs to adapt with the interaction of customers from diverse ethnic and demographic profiles. Service providers can handle the conflict that occurr in intercultural interaction between the customer, in which they learn how to behave appropriately in situations through training programs. Companies need to make their employees know about cultural differences so they can have knowledge of the customer’s expectations, especially in personalized luxury, hotels, clubs and restaurants. It is critical to maintain relationships with customers in the long term.