Just what the doctor ordered? Investigating the impact of health service quality on consumer misbehaviour

The growth in demand and expenditure currently being experienced in the Australian health sector is also accompanied by a rise in dysfunctional customer behaviour, such as verbal abuse and physical violence, perpetrated against health service providers. While service failure and poor recovery are known to trigger consumer misbehaviour, this study investigates whether lower than expected perceived service quality generates cognitive and emotional appraisals that trigger two common forms of misbehaviour: refusal to participate and verbal abuse. Data were collected using a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment administered via online written survey and analysed using path modelling. The findings indicate that perceptions of service encounter quality have an indirect effect on whether consumers refuse to participate in the service and/or verbally abuse the service provider through the mediating effect of anger.

Chinese abstract目前，澳大利亚医疗行业的需求和开支都处于不断增长中，随之而来的也有不良的消费者行为，比如针对医疗服务提供商的言语攻击和身体暴力。众所周知，医疗服务的失败和患者康复不佳都可触发消费者的不良行为。因此，本文探讨低于预期值的医疗服务质量是否会产生相应的认知和情感评价，从而触发两类常见的不良行为，即拒绝合作和言语攻击。本文通过网上书面问卷调查，以2 × 2受访者组间方式采集数据，采用路径模型分析数据。研究结果表明，对医疗服务质量的认知，和消费者是否会通过愤怒等方式拒绝配合和/或言语攻击医疗服务提供商之间没有直接关系。