breaking the boxes in service recovery management: a multilevel approach

As organizations receive more and more complaints, managers need an understanding of how they can optimally manage these complaints. Researchers have examined service recovery for over 40 years, yet strikingly, many customers still receive unsatisfactory responses to their complaints, and the impact of service recovery investments on firm performance remains unclear. Research has mainly developed within different disciplines (marketing, operations management, human resource management), with little integration of these perspectives to date. With this research project, we aim to break these disciplinary boxes that typically exist in the service recovery literature, and propose and test an integrated multilevel framework. In particular, we examine how managers' motivations for service recovery (instrumental vs. normative) explain differences in service recovery systems, how these recovery systems influence frontline employees' recovery performance, and ultimately, how these processes contribute to objective firm performance. Moreover, we examine whether the fit between the quality of the organization's service recovery system and the employees' personal resources (e.g. customer orientation) help or hinder service recovery effectiveness. In all, this research project contributes to both theory as well as managerial practice.