Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

 
2007 Annual International CHRIE Conference & Exposition 
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receptionist and describes what is wrong. Two pictures, displaying a staff-customer interaction, have been used. We 
have manipulated staff’ body posture and eye contact in these pictures. In the first case, the receptionist displays an 
open body posture with an appropriate eye contact. In the second picture, the receptionist displays a closed body 
posture with no eye contact. In each case the receptionist apologizes and tells the customer she would be taking care 
of the problem immediately. After reading the scenario and seen the picture of the receptionist, the respondent is 
required indicate what emotions they would feel most, how s/he thinks that the receptionist behaves, and how they 
would react to the recovery offered. Another set of questions excluding interaction pictures has been used to see 
whether nonverbal communication has lesser/higher influence on customers’ evaluation of staff and service recovery 
effort than verbal communication does
ii
. Sundaram and Webster’s scale was used to measure staff affective 
qualities. This scale consisted of six items (e.g., credible, friendly, competent, emphatic, courteous, and 
trustworthy). The items were followed by a seven point strongly agree-strongly disagree Likert type scale. An 11 
item emotion scale, developed from a review of literature, was used (Yuksel and Yuksel, 2006). Four items were 
borrowed from Zeithalm et al.’s (1996) study to measure respondents’ behavioral intentions. An additional question 
was asked the probability of getting in touch with the same staff in case of other problems experienced during stay. 
Seven point very unlikely/very unlikely scale accompanied these items. Demographic details, such as nationality, 
gender, age, education and marital status were also collected. The survey was administered to conveniently sampled 
200 foreign tourists staying in the selected hotels of Didim, Aydin province in Turkey in the summer months of 
2006.
Data Analysis 
Reliability checks of the scales were conducted. A series of pairwise t-tests were then run to understand 
whether NVB has any effect on respondents’ evaluations of staff affective qualities, emotions and behavioral 
intentions.
RESULTS 
Eighty six percent of the respondents were from the UK, followed by tourists from Ireland, Holland, 
Germany, Poland and others. Fifty four percent of the sample were male. The majority of respondents were in the 
over 40 age-band (44%). These figures conform with general tourist profile that Didim region attracts. Reliability 
tests show that each of the three scales used in the research has acceptable coefficients (0.98 for staff2 affective 
qualities, 0.99 for emotion scale, and 0.97 for behavioral intentions). The results of the t-test indicate there is a 
significant difference between respondents' assessment of the affective qualities of the service personnel in cases of 
negative and positive NVC displays.