Reputation is perception or feeling held by multiple stakeholders. Stakeholders’ negative emotions can trigger revenge behavior such as negative word of mouth, and have significant impact on organization’s reputation. A limited number of works exists in linking reputation and revenge in the psychology literature. In the organizational context, such as disappointment and anger will trigger customers’ revenge behavior against a company (Joireman, Grégoire, Devezer, & Tripp, 2013). Singh (1988) found that one of consumers’ behaviors of revenge is to spread private negative word-of-mouth. For example, reading Internet news about medical disputes should arouse people's negative emotions and in turn lead to negative word-of-mouth communication. Alternatively, forgiveness instead of revenge can be sought. This research aims to identify factors that drive consumer revenge, and how they are linked to corporate reputation, and to develop theories around these variables through a content analysis of news articles.
Content Analysis
A content analysis of news articles published in English language in the last 3 years was conducted. News articles containing keywords such as revenge, consumer and reputation were selected. Table 1 shows the dimensions and associated news examples that were identified as factors triggering revenge behavior from the content analysis. The three constructs included perceived justice, blame attribution, perceived firm greediness. From the literatures, three sub-dimensions of perceived justice are identified: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice.
Revenge act is typically sought after making an initial complaint, and dependent on reaction from the subject companies. The reaction was categorized into three, ignorance, apology, or denial. The impact of revenge on the subject company was measured into two, financial and reputation damages. In some cases revenge leads to the company’s financial loss, while in other cases revenge act had short-term effect on reputation or little impact. The impact of revenge was largely dependent on the type of revenge and existing reputation of the company. When reputation of the company is good, consumers tend to stay with their original belief, rather than altering their views according to others’ experience.
Insert Table 1 about here (submitted directly to conference chair)
Theory Development
Revenge is defined as the infliction of harm in return for perceived wrong (Stuckless and Goranson (1992). Revenge meant people's behavior was performed to harm someone else: “I wanted to take revenge on the person responsible for this service,” “I wanted to give this service provider a bad reputation,” and “I wanted the service provider to lose patients.” (Yi-Chih & Wei, 2015). Hence, revenge is generally regarded as unhealthy and signifying some kind of mental illness (Jacoby, 1983). The positive role of revenge was noted in early times when people coped with injustice through revenge; for example, for the ancient Greeks, revenge was equated with justice (Kim & Smith, 1993; Solomon, 1994).
Perceived justice: The content analysis has identified justice as a major independent variable that triggers a revenge behavior. According to Tax, Brown and Chandrashekaran (1998) customers rely on three justice factors to evaluate complaint issues’s: distributive fairness (the outcomes or compensation received by customers), procedural fairness (the procedures of company to deal with customer complaints) and interactional fairness the way customers are treated by employees). Procedural justice and distributive justice are positively related to customer satisfaction with complaint handling, which is further linked to customer commitment and trust in company. A sequence of events composes the process of complaint handling: (1) communicating the complaint; (2) generating a process to solve the problem; (3) generating outcome or a decision. Justice literature shows that each of these sequences is subject to fairness judgments. From the data analysis and the literature review, propositions are developed.
Proposition 1: Perceived justice (procedural, distributive and interactional justice) is linked to revenge behavior.
Proposition 2: The company’s reaction modifies the link between perceived justice and revenge behavior.
Proposition 3: Revenge type and corporate reputation modify the link between revenge and damage
Conclusion: Content analysis identified factors driving consumer revenge. The propositions proposed here may be tested using a questionnaire survey of customers. The paper reports the results of a pilot study and other factors that were identified as being driver for the revenge. Practical implication is discussed.
corporate reputation, revenge, justice, reputational damage
