“Service with a smile” and emotional contagion: A replication and extension study

The “service with a smile” mantra has been universally proclaimed in the West for its enhanced effect on customer affect and service outcomes. It is replicated in Chinese culture and extended to include repeated down-nods as a prevailing but under-researched social cue. Results of an experimental study with 259 ethnic Chinese millennials show that frontline service employee's smile-nod coupling drives both nonverbal immediacy and authenticity of service encounter behavior which in turn promote employee-customer rapport. However, post-encounter customer affect does not play a part in emotional contagion. Together, these findings suggest that tourism businesses should attend to both smiling and nodding in service delivery and make concerted efforts more on service outcomes than on positive customer affectivity.