Customers' Attributional Judgments towards Complaint Handling in Airline Service: A Confirmatory Study Based on Attribution Theory

Abstract

Besides flight safety, complaint handling plays a crucial role in airline service. Based upon Kelley's attribution theory, in the present study customers' attributions were examined under different conditions of complaint handling by the airlines. There were 531 passengers (216 women; ages 21 to 63 years, M = 41.5, SD = 11.1) with experiences of customer complaints who were recruited while awaiting boarding. Participants received one hypothetical scenario of three attributional conditions about complaint handling and then reported their attributional judgments. The findings indicated that the passengers were most likely to attribute the company's complaint handling to unconditional compliance when the airline company reacted to customer complaints under low distinctiveness, high consistency, and when consensus among the airlines was low. On the other hand, most passengers attributed the company's complaint handling to conditional compliance under the conditions in which distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus were all high. The results provide further insights into how different policies of complaint management affect customers' attributions. Future directions and managerial implications are also discussed.