Primitive emotional contagion has been proposed to explain why 'service with a smile' predicts encounter satisfaction. We provide a comprehensive test of this mechanism by examining mimicry and mood as mediators in service encounters, contrasted with a direct path through perceived service quality. Independent coders recorded the smiling strength of employees and customers at three points in time during real service encounters, and 173 customers completed a post-encounter survey. Mimicry effects were supported; however, only service quality appraisals, and not customers' affect, fully mediated the relationship of employee smiling and encounter satisfaction. KEYWORDS: emotional contagion, customer service, emotional labor, mimicry, service appraisal, mood, encounter satisfaction Service with a Smile 3 "When you're smilin', keep on smilin' The whole world smiles with you." 1 In customer service settings, "service with a smile" is a job requirement found to enhance tipping (Tidd & Lockard, 1978) , intentions to return to the store (Tsai, 2001) , and customer satisfaction (Brown & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994) . Previously, service researchers proposed that service with a smile impacts customer attitudes and behaviors through the effect on cognitive appraisals of the behaviors, such as perceived service quality or met expectations (Oliver, 1997; Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1985) . More recently, primitive emotional contagion, a nonconscious process by which moods are transferred through mimicry of the displays (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994) , has been implicated as the primary mechanism. Indeed, research has shown that positive displays predict customer attitudes and intentions through their effect on customers' post-encounter mood (Pugh, 2001; Tsai & Huang, 2002 ). In the current study, we extend this research in three ways. First, we examine a typically omitted but critical component of the emotional contagion process, facial mimicry, to see if customers' expressions change as a function of employees' expressions as proposed by others (e.g., Pugh, 2001) . Second, we compare emotional contagion mechanisms against the direct appraisal of service quality as explanations for the employee smiling-encounter satisfaction relationship. Finally, we specifically focus on "service with a smile" by measuring smiling strength (Tidd & Lockard, 1978) rather than more general "positive behaviors" (e.g., greetings, eye contact) used previously (Mattila & Enz, 2002; Pugh, 2001; Sutton & Rafaeli, 1988 Service with a Smile 4 Encounter satisfaction represents a customer's attitude about a service interaction he or she has just experienced (Oliver, 1997) . Though referring to a single encounter, this attitude is an important performance indicator; researchers have shown that encounter satisfaction is associated with desired customer behaviors (e.g., Athanassopoulos, Gounaris, & Stathakopoulos, 2001; Gottlieb, Grewal, & Brown, 1994) . "Service with a smile" results in satisfying encounters (Brown & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994) , but explanations for this relationship are not well understood. The process of primitive emotional contagion, as discussed by Hatfield et al. (1994) , refers to how expressed moods are infectious to others by an automatic process involving two mechanisms: (1) mimicry and (2) feedback (Hatfield et al., 1994; Neumann & Strack, 2000) . Mimicry is the synchronous imitation of others' expressions that facilitates social interactions (e.g., during interviews, between mothers-infants) (e.g., Meltzhoff & Moore, 1992) . The typically argued motive for this mimicry is to affiliate or empathize with others which might seem unlikely in a short service encounter; however, others have argued that mimicry occurs among strangers without an affiliation goal (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999) . In fact, mimicry is thought to be a primitive behavioral reflex that occurs at the physiological and non-conscious level (e.g., Lundqvist, 1995) . Since mimicry is typically found in laboratory settings, "the question of whether individuals mimic the type of expressions they are likely to encounter in everyday life deserves further investigation" (Hess & Blairy, 2001, p. 131). Previous service research has proposed, but not tested, that mimicry occurs during a service encounter (e.g., Pugh, 2001, see p. 1020). Thus, we propose: Hypothesis 1: Employee smiling predicts customer smiling during service encounters. The theory of primitive emotional contagion further suggests that this mimicked expression mediates the effect of an observed expression on felt mood due to feedback mechanisms. The individual who has imitated a smile may now feel happier due to either physiological changes, such as increased oxygen enhancing exuberance (Zajonc, 1985) , or from inferences about one's enjoyment based on self-perception of the behaviors (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Neumann & Strack, 2000) . Extensive laboratory research has demonstrated the feedback effect (e.g., Duclos & Laird, 2001; Soussignan, 2002; Stepper & Strack, 1993) , though research conducted with more realistic and less prototypical facial expressions have been less supportive (Hess & Blairy, 2001 ). In the service context, studies have shown that employees' expressions predict customer's post-encounter moods (Pugh, 2001; Tsai & Huang, 2002) and that customer displays during encounters predict their post-encounter moods (Mattila & Enz, 2002) , but none have previously shown that mimicry mediates the relationship of employees' expressions on customer moods. We expect that employee smiling relates to customer mood, and that customer smiling explains this relationship. Hypothesis 2: Customer smiling during the encounter mediates the relationship of employee smiling on post-encounter customer mood. Though not explicitly part of contagion theory, service researchers have argued that once customer mood is influenced by "service with a smile", mood can influence appraisals of the encounter through affect infusion (Forgas, 1995; Pugh, 2001) . Affect infusion proposes how and when mood acts as information that influences judgments. A positive mood is most likely to lead to more positive reactions and less critical thinking when the appraiser is making quick global judgments that have little personal relevance (Forgas, 1995) , resulting in better performance appraisals (Baron, 1987; Sinclair & Mark, 1995) and satisfaction ratings of the Service with a Smile 6 target (Brief, Butcher, & Roberson, 1995) . Customers' judgments about service encounters fit these conditions. In fact, research supports that customers' positive moods predict higher quality service appraisals (Pugh, 2001; Mattila & Enz, 2002) . Thus, employee smiling is proposed to predict appraisals of service performance and encounter satisfaction through customer mood. Hypothesis 3: Customer post-encounter mood mediates the relationship of employee smiling with service appraisals (3a) and overall encounter satisfaction (3b). Alternatively, the effect of employee smiling on encounter satisfaction may be due to cognitive appraisals of the employee rather than contagion or mood processes. "Service with a smile" is a well-known job expectation in the United States, and as such is linked with quality service in customers' minds (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987) . In general social interactions, smiling indicates a desire to affiliate with others and to continue the current interaction (Manstead, Fischer, & Jakobs, 1999) . Such behaviors indicate good customer service in comparison to an encounter where the expression suggests a lack of desire to continue the interaction. More specifically, smiling employees may create satisfied customers by influencing appraisals of service quality (Grove & Fisk, 1989; Oliver, 1997) . Parasuraman and colleagues (1985) identified behaviors that represent high service quality, including social behaviors such as responsiveness and caring, along with more task-oriented behaviors such as efficiency, reliability and competence. In general, people appraise others who express positive emotions as being more likeable and courteous, all else being equal, even when they are in a transactional or business relationship (Clark & Taraban, 1991; Harker & Keltner, 2001) , and the same has been supported in service contexts (Grandey, 2003; Tsai & Huang, 2002) . Moreover, positive expressions are linked to competence attributes such as efficiency and high overall performance (Grandey, Fisk, Mattila, Jansen, & Sideman, 2005; Staw & Barsade, 1993) , and high service quality specifically Service with a Smile 7 (Pugh, 2001) . High service quality appraisals directly predict encounter satisfaction (Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Gottlieb et al., 1994) , and thus a smiling employee may increase customers' satisfaction with the encounter by improving the appraisal of the service quality, and not necessarily through imitated expressions or mood of the customer. Hypothesis 4: Appraisals of service quality mediate the relationship between employee smiling and encounter satisfaction. In summary, this is the first known study to examine whether mimicry occurs in a service context and whether it explains why service with a smile predicts customer mood. We also examine whether mood explains the relationship of "service with a smile" with encounter satisfaction, or whether satisfaction is explained as employee smiling being appraised as "quality service". See Figure 1 for a representation of the proposed links. These are not necessarily competing hypotheses: it is possible that mimicry, affect infusion, and service appraisals all help explain the relationship of 'service with a smile' with encounter satisfaction. _________________________________________ Insert Figure 1 about here _________________________________________ A total of 220 employee-customer encounters in food/coffee services was observed by two trained coders who recorded either employee or customer behaviors. Customers were then asked to report their mood, service quality appraisals, and encounter satisfaction. The different sources were matched with code numbers on the observational sheets and the survey. Service with a Smile 8 The coders were 20 pairs of first-year undergraduate students from two semesters of a special topic seminar at a large university in the northeastern United States. The authors provided a 75-minute training session on distinguishing facial expressions and completing the observation sheets using photographs, videos, and role-play. Coders also practiced using the observation procedure and forms at on-campus restaurants prior to actual data collection. Coders had four weeks to complete their 10 to 12 official observations for this study. Previous studies have used single coders (Pugh, 2000) and multiple coders (Tsai & Huang, 2002) to record employee displays in service encounters and have shown that trained coders can reliably record the occurrence of smiling, eye contact, and vocal greetings (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1990) . Though multiple coders are needed to demonstrate inter-rater reliability, our study would have required four raters to have two raters for both the employee and customer. Given the need to remain unobtrusive to avoid demand effects on behavior, this was not practical, particularly for our small food services locations. To check the reliability of observations for our study, a subset of seven pairs of coders conducted practice observations in coffee stores, and each pair observed the same target (i.e., the employee). They recorded smiling at the beginning, middle and end of the encounter (described more below), the occurrence of verbal greetings and farewells, and the occurrence of eye contact. The coding matched 95% of the time for smiling (20/21 matches). There was 100% accuracy for verbalizations (14/14) and eye contact (7/7). The high reliability is probably due to the brief duration of these encounters as well as our training procedures. Thus, we were confident that our coders could reliably record the behaviors of interest for our study. Service with a Smile 9 All observations were done in October, to avoid holiday and end-of-semester factors, and in the same downtown area in a mid-sized university town to minimize differences in the clientele. Observations occurred in seven stores that offered food services. These stores were selected because they had counter-only service with seating such that our coders could sit separately from each other, keeping observations independent, while having a clear front or side view of the target. Coders nonverbally indicated to each other when they were ready to begin observations, and the next customer who entered alone was the observational target, to avoid confounding social factors. Observations were conducted only when there were few people waiting at the counter, since previous research shows that expectations for positive displays differ during busy times (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1990) . As the customer left the counter with the product, a team member asked the customer to fill out a survey. It was made clear that the survey was for research and was not affiliated with the store to avoid social desirability bias in the participants' ratings. All responses were anonymous; each survey had a code to match it with the raters' corresponding observation sheets. Coders also recorded the time of each encounter from the customer's approach to the counter to when they departed that same counter. The encounters lasted about two minutes on average (M = 118.57 seconds, SD = 83.10). The 220 observed customers were asked to complete the exit survey and 173 (78.6%) agreed, with the most common explanation for non-compliance being "too busy". The demographics of the respondents were not different from the observed sample of 220. In the final sample of 173 encounters, 74.5% (76.7% in the observed sample) involved female employees, consistent with data on service workers (Hochschild, 1983). Of the customers, Service with a Smile 10 59.5% (57.8% in the observed sample) were female. As expected for this region, 96% (96.4% in the observed sample) of the sample of employees were "White," with three employees coded as "Black" and three as "Hispanic." A majority -85% (83% in the observed sample) -of customers was "White," though 17 were coded as "Asian," three as "Black," two as "Hispanic", two as "Indian", and there were 2 that could not be categorized. The racial composition of customers was similar to the broader community.
In a study of facial mimicry between a service provider and a customer, at a coffee shop, there was a positive correlation between mutually similar facial expressions and positive customer evaluation REF .
SERVICE WITH A SMILE AND ENCOUNTER SATISFACTION: EMOTIONAL CONTAGION AND APPRAISAL MECHANISMS.
Academy of Management Journal
Psychology