Intercultural differences of customer emotions in service encounters

The thesis is structured as follows: In a first step, the basics of services marketing are presented and the distinguished characteristics of services are addressed. Consequently, service encounters are introduced as the first building block of this thesis. In addition, the fundamentals of emotions and culture are outlined. Subsequently, chapter 3 deals with the relevance of emotions and culture in service encounters. In the following, the interplay between culture and emotion is brought to the fore by presenting the three main approaches concerning this matter. Subsequently, the perspective is narrowed down on the cultural dimension of Individualism/Collectivism and its influence on emotions (chapter 4). The compiled results from this approach are then employed to deduce implications for the management of services in general and concrete consequences for service staff in particular (chapter 5). Ultimately, main findings are summarized, an outlook is given and suggestions for further research opportunities into this domain are suggested.