Adaptive versus Proactive Behavior in Service Recovery: The Role of Self-Managing Teams

In this article, we develop a conceptual model of adaptive versus proactive recovery behavior by self-managing teams (SMTs) in service recovery operations. To empirically test the conceptual model a combination of bank employee, customer, and archival data is collected. The results demonstrate support for independent group-level effects of intrateam support on adaptive and proactive recovery behavior, indicating that perceptual consensus within service teams has incremental value in explaining service recovery performance. In addition, we provide evidence that adaptive and proactive recovery behavior have differential effects on external performance measures. More specifically, higher levels of adaptive performance positively influence customer-based parameters (i.e., service recovery satisfaction and loyalty intentions), while employee proactive recovery behavior contributes to higher share of customer rates. Subject Areas: Hierarchical Linear Modeling, Organizational Behavior, Self-Managing Teams, Service Management, and Service Recovery Performance.