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IJSIM
19,5
552
Received 29 June 2007
Revised 18 November 2007
Accepted 11 February 2008 Abstract
International Journal of Service
Industry Management
Vol. 19 No. 5, 2008
pp. 552-574
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0956-4233
DOI 10.1108/09564230810903460
Revisiting the smiling service
worker and customer satisfaction
Magnus Söderlund and Sara Rosengren
Stockholm School of Economics, Center for Consumer Marketing,
Stockholm, Sweden
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine if the service worker’s display of smiles in the
service encounter has an effect on customer satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach – An experimental design was used in which participants
(N ¼ 220) were randomly allocated to one of four service encounters. Two variables were manipulated;
the service worker with whom the participant interacted had either a neutral facial expression or a
smiling facial expression, and the service worker was either male or female.
Findings – The smiling service worker produced a higher level of customer satisfaction than the
neutral service worker, regardless of the sex of the service worker (and the sex of the participant). In
addition, the results indicate that this outcome involved both emotional contagion and affect infusion.
Originality/value – This paper extends the service literature’s discourse on the impact of the service
worker’s smile behavior on customer satisfaction by including intermediate variables such as
appraisals, emotions, and the attitude toward the service worker.
Keywords Service industries, Customer satisfaction
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Customer satisfaction has emerged as a key variable in many firms, and it has been
shown to affect many other performance-related variables (Luo and Homburg, 2007).
Consequently, both firms and academicians have invested heavily in attempts to come
to terms with the antecedents of customer satisfaction. Service research has indeed
contributed to these attempts, and it is clear from such research that the behavior of the
service worker in the service encounter is a main determinant of customer satisfaction
(Bitner et al., 1990, 1994; Hartline and Jones, 1996; Smith et al., 1999; Winsted, 2000).
In this paper, we examine one particular source of impact on customer satisfaction: the
service worker’s smile behavior in the service encounter. The received view in many
service firms is that the service worker should smile while interacting with customers,
because this behavior is assumed to affect the customer’s impressions in a positive way.
Consequently, copious firms – such as Disneyland, McDonalds, Burger King, Body Shop,
Wal-Mart, and Sea World – instruct service workers to smile in service encounters
(Bryman, 2004). Yet researchers have questioned this received view. One reason is that the
enforcement by management of various emotional display behaviors, such as smiling,
may create a stressful and exhausting situation for the service worker (Ashforth and
Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2003) and reduce job satisfaction (Morris and Feldman, 1997).
And these outcomes are likely to have a negative impact on customer satisfaction. The
Body Shop checklist item “Smile dammit smile!” (Cook and Macaulay, 1997) is a sterling
example of a rule with a stress-inducing potential. Another example in the same spirit
is the Wal-Mart “Miles of Smile corridor”, covered with images of smiling colleagues,
which has lead some observers, such as Blythman (2004), to various Maoistic associations. Revisiting
In addition, the received view appears to be in conflict with some empirical results the smiling
regarding the link between the service worker’s smiling behavior and customer
satisfaction. Brown and Sulzer-Azaroff (1994), for example, found a non-significant service worker
correlation between the service worker’s level of smile and customer satisfaction.
A main thesis in this paper, however, is that the service worker’s display of smile indeed
contributes to customer satisfaction, yet it does so in a mediated way. In other words, we 553
argue that a better understanding of the smile-satisfaction link needs to take into account
mediating variables. Previous research by Barger and Grandey (2006) suggest that this is
the case; they found that customers’ quality perceptions mediated the link between service
worker smiling behavior and customer satisfaction. Moreover, Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006)
found that customer-employee rapport mediated the link. A mediation model has also been
presented by Söderlund and Rosengren (2004), who suggest that the link between smiling
behavior and satisfaction is fuelled by the customer’s appraisal of the emotional state of
the service worker with whom the customer interacts, and that this appraisal provides
inputs for two mechanisms. Both mechanisms have been acknowledged in service
research, but they have rarely been used together in the same study. The first mechanism
is emotional contagion; that is, the extent to which one person “catches” the emotion
displayed by another person with whom she/he interacts (Hatfield et al., 1992; Hess et al.,
1998; Neumann and Strack, 2000; Pugh, 2001). The second is affect infusion, which refers
to the capacity of the emotions evoked by one particular object to color the evaluations of
the same object, and of related objects, in a valence-congruent way (Forgas, 1995). A model
containing appraisals of the interacting party’s emotional state, emotional contagion, and
affect infusion has also been able to explain how a potential customer comes to form an
evaluation of a service firm when this customer is subject to emotional display behavior by
an existing customer who is transmitting word-of-mouth about the service firm
(Söderlund and Rosengren, 2007).
Barger and Grandey (2006), Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) and Söderlund and Rosengren
(2004) have thus presented alternative models of how a service worker’s smile behavior
affects customer satisfaction by mediating variables. All of them, however, have left out
variables related to customers’ evaluation of the service worker – which seems to be an
important variable in the customer’s formation of an overall evaluation of a service firm
(such as a satisfaction assessment). Another problem with existing research on the
smile-satisfaction link is that several studies comprise idiosyncratic, ad hoc satisfaction
measures (Barger and Grandey, 2006; Brown and Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994; Hennig-Thurau
et al., 2006). Such satisfaction measures have sometimes also been of the single-item type,
and no attempts were made by the authors to assess their reliability (Grandey et al., 2005;
Brown and Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994). It appears to be high time, then, to examine the
smile-satisfaction link with a well-established customer satisfaction measure that allows
for more contact with other satisfaction research.
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine and extend the discussion of the
mediated link between the service worker’s level of smile and customer satisfaction by
explicitly including also evaluations of the service worker. We do so by including the
customer’s attitude toward the service worker. Moreover, we will employ the perhaps
most well-established satisfaction measure that exists today, in terms of the number of
respondents who have been involved: Fornell’s (1992) scale, which is used in customer
satisfaction barometers in many countries (Johnson et al., 2001).
IJSIM It may be argued that the service worker’s display of smiles and its contribution to
19,5 customer satisfaction is a relatively minor and perhaps also superficial issue for our
understanding of the service encounter. We believe, however, that smiling behavior
should be seen as a part of a larger packet of emotion-charged stimuli in service
encounters, and that the impact of emotions in this context deserves more attention.
Indeed, it is now clear that emotions play a crucial role in decision-making processes
554 (Lucey and Dowling, 2005), which is reflected in a growing emphasis on emotions in
psychology and in consumer behavior (Simonson et al., 2001). An increasingly important
mediating role for emotions is also visible in service and retailing literature (Mattila and
Enz, 2002; Sherman et al., 1997; Yoo et al., 1998; Wirtz and Bateson, 1999). Yet many
studies in these two latter fields have focused on other emotion-evoking objects than
the service worker (Lee and Dubinsky, 2003), such as the physical environment of
service delivery systems (Wakefield and Blodgett, 1999), despite the fact that much of
the emotion people experience arises in interactions with other persons (Clark and
Taraban, 1991; Shaver et al., 1987). In any case, whatever the specific origin of emotions
in a service setting, Berry (2000) has argued that strong service brands always have an
emotional impact on the customer. Our present smile-focused study should therefore be
seen as an attempt to contribute not only to research on the smile-satisfaction link, but
also to a more general stream of research which acknowledges that emotions have an
important mediating impact on the customer’s reactions to a service offer.

Theoretical framework
Overview of the framework
Our main thesis is that the smile of a service worker who interacts with a customer in a
service encounter provides clues that set in motion a response process in which mediating
variables are involved and that this process ultimately has an impact on customer
satisfaction. These mediating variables are the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s
overall emotional state, the customer’s own positive emotions, and the customer’s attitude
toward the service worker. Our model of this process contains seven links (Figure 1),

Appraisal of the
service worker’s Link 6
Link 1 emotional state
Attitude
toward the
The service service worker
worker’s Link 3
display
of smile Link 7
Link 4
Link 2 Customer’s
positive
emotions
Customer
Link 5 satisfaction
Figure 1.
The proposed model
comprising both emotional contagion and affect infusion, and we discuss these links in the Revisiting
sections below. These links, we argue, serve to produce a result in which the smiling service the smiling
worker induces a higher level of customer satisfaction than the non-smiling service worker,
and this outcome represents the main hypothesis in the present study. service worker

Smiles as emotional display behavior and the customer’s appraisals

While interacting with a customer in a service encounter, the service worker is likely to 555
transmit clues – in terms of facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice
– containing information about the service worker’s emotional state. These clues are
sometimes referred to as emotional display behaviors (Sutton and Rafaeli, 1988). Given
such clues, we assume that the customer (i.e. the receiver) uses them to assess
the service worker’s (i.e. the sender’s) emotional state, because to facilitate social
interaction, people are motivated to understand each other’s emotions (Ickes, 1993).
This assessment can be viewed as an appraisal (Arnold and Landry, 1999; Lazarus,
1982; Nyer, 1997); that is, an immediate, well-nigh automatic response that serves to
mediate the relationship between the individual and the environment. We believe that
the receiver can make such appraisals in terms of many different, specific emotions
(e.g. “the sender is irritated”, “the sender is angry”, “the sender is joyful”), yet we
believe that one basic and universal valence dimension covers them all (Russell, 2003).
This means that we expect that a general unhappy-happy continuum is a fundamental
and irreducible aspect of the receiver’s perception of the sender’s emotional state. It
appears as if facial expressions provide particularly important clues for such
unhappy-happy appraisals, and individuals are very skilled at processing emotional
information originating from faces (Niedenthal, 1990). Several empirical studies
(Harker and Keltner, 2001; Neumann and Strack, 2000) also show that the receiver’s
assessment of a person’s emotional state is highly correlated with the emotional state
of the person who is displaying emotions.
The display of smiles is a particularly important facial expression; it may be the
earliest learned and most generally understood of the nonverbal cues of interpersonal
relationships (Bayes, 1972). And several studies indicate that receivers use this
variable for various attributions about the sender (Harker and Keltner, 2001; Lau, 1982;
Reis et al., 1990). It should be noted that of all appearance-related characteristics of a
person, smiling generates one of the highest levels of consensus among receivers
(Borkenau and Liebler, 1992). Smiles have also received very high scores in studies of
people’s beliefs about overt expressions of positive emotions (Shaver et al., 1987).
Moreover, in terms of the expected correlation between the emotional state of a person
who is displaying emotions and a receiver’s assessment of this person’s emotional
state, it has been shown that the more extensive a person smiles, the more the receiver
perceives this person to be in a positive emotional state (Otta et al., 1996). Given this,
we assume that when the service worker is displaying a smile, she/he is judged to be in
a more positive emotional state by a customer compared to when she/he is not
displaying a smile. This assumption is represented by Link 1 in our proposed model
(Figure 1).

Emotional contagion
Several authors have noted that emotions are contagious in social situations, in the
sense that one person is easily “catching” the emotion displayed by another person
IJSIM with whom she/he interacts (Hatfield et al., 1992; Hess et al., 1998; Hsee et al., 1990;
19,5 Neumann and Strack, 2000; Pugh, 2001). Given an emotion-charged view of service
encounters, we therefore expect that the sender’s displayed emotions affect the
receiver’s emotions.
The means by which the receiver’s emotions are affected, however, are yet to be settled.
Some authors view the link between the sender’s display behavior and the receiver’s
556 emotions in terms of a facial feedback hypothesis: exposure to the sender’s face results in
mimicking muscular activity in the receiver’s face – and this muscular activity informs
the receiver about his or her own emotional state (Hatfield et al., 1992; Hess et al., 1998).
Barger and Grandey (2006) found support for this in a service setting; they found that the
service worker’s smile strength was positively associated with the customer’s smile
strength, and that customer smile strength was positively associated with the customer’s
positive mood. Given this, we assume that when the service worker is displaying a smile,
she/he produces more positive customer emotions compared to when she/he is not
displaying a smile, which is represented by Link 2 in our proposed model in Figure 1.
We do not question the facial feedback hypothesis, but we are mindful of the modest
variation in the receiver’s emotions that is explained by his/her own facial muscular
movements (cf. the low-effect sizes in Barger and Grandey, 2006 and in Harris and
Alvarado, 2005). Such empirical results invite the conjecture that one’s face muscles
cannot be the only source of one’s emotions. Indeed, we believe that the receiver’s
emotions are also predicated on cognitive activity in terms of the appraisal of the
sender’s overall emotional state. This belief is consistent with Hsee et al.’s (1990)
assumption that our conscious realization that one person is in one particular
emotional state could make us end up in the same emotional state. An important
assumption behind a causal link between:
.
the receiver’s appraisal of the sender’s overall emotional state; and
.
the receiver’s own emotions is that appraisals are antecedents to emotions; the
link between a stimulus and an emotional reaction is thus seen as mediated by an
appraisal (Ellsworth and Smith, 1988; Frijda et al., 1989; Lazarus, 1982; Nyer,
1997; Roseman, 1991; Smith and Ellsworth, 1985).

Empirical research on service customers, however, has only rarely considered the role
of such appraisals for the individual’s own emotions. Yet in the light of a few
appraisal-based empirical findings showing correlations between appraisals and
emotions (Söderlund and Rosengren, 2004; Söderlund and Rosengren, 2007), we believe
that such appraisals represent a potential for improving our understanding of why
customers come to feel what they feel in social interactions. In a service encounter,
then, we expect that the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s overall emotional
state serves as a point of reference for emotional mimicry and that the appraisal is
related to the customer’s own emotions in a valence-congruent way. That is to say, we
assume that the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s emotional state is
positively associated with the customer’s own positive emotions. This is Link 3 in our
proposed model in Figure 1.

Affect infusion
When one particular object is evoking emotions, such emotions often inform
evaluations of this object in a valence-congruent way. This impact of emotions on
evaluations has been referred to as affect infusion (Forgas, 1995; Forgas and George, Revisiting
2001; Pham, 2004). Here, we expect that affect infusion serves to produce a positive the smiling
association between the customer’s positive emotions and the attitude toward the
service worker (that is, an overall evaluation of the service worker), which is service worker
represented by Link 4 in our proposed model (Figure 1).
Affect infusion, however, has been documented not only when the emotion-evoking
object and the evaluation object are the same; affect infusion may also materialize 557
when the two objects are relatively unrelated (Forgas, 1995; Pham, 2004). Presumably,
the level of affect infusion is a function of the degree of relatedness between objects, in
the sense that an evaluation of one particular object is likely to be more affected by
emotions the more this particular object is responsible for the emotions. The level of
relatedness between objects and its potentially moderating impact on affect infusion,
however, has not received much attention in the literature (Pham, 1998). Here, we make
an attempt to explore this issue by examining affect infusion in the mind of the service
customer for which the emotion-evoking object is the service worker and the evaluation
object is the firm in which the service worker is employed. Moreover, we examine this
evaluation in terms of customer satisfaction – which we view as a global evaluation
variable. In more specific terms, and thus in addition to the expected link between the
customer’s own emotions and the attitude toward the service worker (i.e. Link 4 in
Figure 1), we expect a positive association between the customer’s own positive
emotions and customer satisfaction. This, then, is Link 5 in the proposed model in
Figure 1. In empirical terms, Link 5 is suggested by the results in Barger and Grandey
(2006) and Söderlund and Rosengren (2004) and in several studies of emotional
antecedents of customer satisfaction (Mano and Oliver, 1993; Mattila and Enz, 2002;
Oliver, 1993; Wirtz and Bateson, 1999).

Additional and non-emotional links

We include two additional links in our model. First, we believe that there can be a
direct link between the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s overall emotional
state and the customer’s attitude toward the service worker. This link should be seen in
the light of research indicating that persons who are perceived to be in a positive
emotional state are perceived to be more likeable (Clark and Taraban, 1991; Lau, 1982),
pleasant (Harker and Keltner, 2001), friendly (Nelson et al., 1988), intelligent (Lau,
1982), sincere and sociable (Reis et al., 1990), and subject to more positive overall
evaluations (Lau, 1982) than persons perceived to be in negative or neutral emotional
states. A smile, then, and as one physical characteristic of a person, appears to work in
a way which is similar to the more well-documented “what is beautiful is good”
stereotype, in the sense that both the smile and good looks induce attributions of many
positive aspects of a person. Yet the smile appears to have these effects independent of
physical attractiveness, even though smiles serve to increase perceptions of physical
attractiveness (Reis et al., 1990). Here, we assume that such smile effects are contingent
on an appraisal of the person’s overall emotional state, and we therefore expect a
positive association between the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s overall
emotional state and the customer’s attitude toward the service worker. This is
represented by Link 6 in Figure 1.
Second, previous research shows that several specific characteristic of the service
worker, such as friendliness (Grandey et al., 2005) and responsiveness to service
IJSIM delivery failures (Bitner et al., 1990, Bitner et al., 1994), are associated with customer
19,5 satisfaction. The main reason appears to be that services in general are inseparable
from the person who delivers the service; the service worker thus becomes a highly
salient figure against a ground from the customer’s point of view. Moreover, the
customer’s perceptions of the service worker’s characteristics can be viewed as beliefs
about various service worker attributes; therefore, given attitude theories such at the
558 theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1973), we assume that such attributes
are subsumed under a general evaluation in terms of an attitude toward the service
worker. We thus expect a positive association between the customer’s attitude toward
the service worker and customer satisfaction; it is represented by Link 7 in Figure 1.

Hypotheses
In sum, then, we expect that the service worker’s display of smile in a service encounter
sets in motion a process involving the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s
emotional state, the customer’s own emotions and the attitude toward the service
worker, and that these variables contribute to customer satisfaction. More specifically,
this is what we hypothesize with regard to the outcome of the process:
H1. When the service worker smiles in the service encounter, she/he produces a
higher level of customer satisfaction compared to when she/he does not smile.
We make an attempt to test this hypothesis by taking into account one additional
aspect that may contribute to customer satisfaction when the customer is interacting
with a smiling or non-smiling service worker in the service encounter: the sex of the
service worker. Although theory is not well-developed in this area, it has been shown
that women smile more than men (Deutsch, 1990). It has also been argued that women
are more emotionally expressive than men (Mattila et al., 2003). This means that a
smiling female service worker may be considered more prototypical than a male
service worker. Given that a typical stimulus fosters information processing fluency
(i.e. the ease with which information can be processed) to a larger extent than a
non-typical stimulus, and given that a high level of processing fluency has a positively
value and is likely to color an evaluation in a valence-congruent way (Schwarz, 2004), a
smiling female service worker may contribute more to customer satisfaction than a
smiling male service worker. Theory thus suggests an interaction between the service
worker’s smiling behavior and the service worker’s sex (rather than a main effect of the
service worker’s sex), so we hypothesize the following:
H2. When the female service worker smiles in the service encounter, she produces
a higher level of customer satisfaction compared to a smiling male service
worker.
We turn now to an empirical assessment of these two hypotheses (and to an
assessment of the assumed mediating links).

Research method
Research design
We used a role-play scenario to create service encounter stimuli; the participant was
asked to imagine that he or she was a customer who visited a service firm and who
interacted with one of this firm’s service workers. Each participant was randomly
allocated to one of four scenarios. Each scenario contained a text and a photo of a Revisiting
smiling or a neutral service worker who was either male or female. Moreover, the text the smiling
was identical for each of the four scenarios, except for the use of “he” or “she” when we
referred to the service worker (the Appendix contains the male service worker version service worker
of the text). With regard to the service worker’s behavior, then, we have made an
attempt to focus only on smiling behavior in terms of if a smile was displayed or not.
We thus used a between-subjects design with two manipulated variables (the service 559
worker’s display of smile and the service worker’s sex). The scenarios were included in
a questionnaire packet containing measures of the responses in the proposed model.

Stimuli
Text-based scenarios (Eroglu, 1987), sometimes also referred to as vignettes
(Alexander and Becker, 1978), appear frequently in the service literature (Bitner,
1990; Murray, 1991; Ueltschy et al., 2002), and one fundamental advantage is that they
allow for a systematic manipulation of variables and contexts that cannot be easily
studied in a real-life setting or are difficult to manipulate in other ways in experiments.
Here, we decided that the scenario situation should deal with a pre-purchase exchange
of information between a service worker and a customer, and we depicted this
exchange as taking place in a travel agency context. The specific service covered by
the scenario is a holiday trip. Each scenario contained a 5 £ 5 cm black and white
photograph of the service worker with whom the participant interacted. Four different
photos were used, involving one male model (smiling or neutral) and one female model
(smiling or neutral). In addition to proving us with room to examine if the service
worker’s sex interacts with the service worker’s smiling behavior in producing
satisfaction effects, it should be noted that our design with both a male and a female
service worker serves the purpose of increasing the generalizability of the setting
(Wells and Windshitl, 1999).

Participants
We recruited the participants from courses in business administration for
undergraduates and adult decision makers. The number of participants receiving
one of the four scenarios was 55 and the study thus involves 220 participants. The
share of male participants was 54 percent; the share of female participants was 46
percent. A x 2 test revealed that there was no significant difference in the proportion of
males versus females in the four treatment groups (x 2(3) ¼ 3.18, p ¼ 0.36).

Measures
Dependent variable. To capture the main outcome variable, customer satisfaction, we
used the three satisfaction items employed in several national satisfaction barometers
(Fornell, 1992; Johnson et al., 2001), which we adapted to a travel agency context: “How
satisfied or dissatisfied are you with this travel agency?” (1 ¼ very dissatisfied,
10 ¼ very satisfied), “To what extent does this travel agency meet your
expectations?” (1 ¼ not at all, 10 ¼ totally), and “Imagine a travel agency that is
perfect in every respect. How near or far from this ideal do you find this travel agency?”
(1 ¼ very far from, 10 ¼ can not get any closer). Cronbach’s a for this scale was 0.91.
Moreover, our satisfaction measure taps into transaction-specific satisfaction or service
encounter satisfaction (Barger and Grandey, 2003; Mattila et al., 2003), rather than
IJSIM accumulated satisfaction resulting from an ongoing service relationship (Lee and
19,5 Dubinsky, 2003). To examine the nomological validity in this measure, and given the
frequent assumption that customer satisfaction affects several intentions (Söderlund,
2006), we included one purchase intention item (How likely is it that you would by a
trip from this travel agency?) and one word-of-mouth intention item (How likely is it
that you would recommend this travel agency to a friend?). We provided a response
560 format ranging from 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely) for both items. Then, we
computed the zero-order correlations between the satisfaction variable and the two
intention variables, and the resulting correlations (r ¼ 0.71, p , 0.01; r ¼ 0.71,
p , 0.01) indicate that nomological validity was at hand in the satisfaction measure.
Other variables. To allow an examination of the variables which we assume are
mediating the effects on customer satisfaction, we asked the participants about their
appraisal of the service worker’s emotional state. We used a single-item measure
comprising the adjective pair “unhappy-happy”, which was scored on a scale ranging
from 1 (unhappy) to 10 (happy). The unhappy-happy continuum was assumed to
capture the fundamental valence aspect of emotions (Russell, 2003). This measure was
taken in the end of the questionnaire, and it was mixed with other items related to the
service person’s characteristics, because we also used it as a manipulation check item
(Perdue and Summers, 1986). Moreover, we assessed the customer’s own emotional
state by explicitly focusing on one basic and discrete positive emotion, namely joy
(Clore et al., 1987; Morgan and Heise, 1988; Russell, 1980; Russell and Carroll, 1999). We
acknowledge that there are several discrete positive emotions, but we believe that joy is
of special interest, because it appears to be the specific emotional state experienced
with the greatest strength in consumption contexts (Richins, 1997) and in everyday life
(Zelenski and Larsen, 2000). To measure joy, we asked this question: “How do you feel
now, after having visited this travel agency?”. It was followed by the items “I feel
joyful”, “I feel pleased”, and “I am in a good mood”. These items were scored on
10-point response format ranging from 1 (do not agree at all) to 10 (agree completely).
a was 0.86. We thus used unipolar items to capture the receiver’s joy, which is in tune
with the recommendations by Bagozzi et al. (1999). Similar adjectives for joy have been
used by, for example, Richins (1997) and Söderlund and Rosengren (2004). Finally, we
captured the customer’s attitude toward the service worker with three adjective pairs
scored on a ten-point scale: bad-good, dislike the person-like the person, and
uninteresting-interesting (a ¼ 0.82). Similar items are used in several attitude
measures in marketing-related research (MacKenzie and Lutz, 1989).

Analysis and results

Manipulation check
We used the measure of the participants’ appraisal of the service worker’s emotional
state (on an unhappy-happy continuum) for a manipulation check. This variable can be
seen as a theoretical consequence of the smile manipulation, rather than a direct check
of the smile manipulation itself. Yet we wished to avoid including direct questions
about the service worker’s facial expression, because we felt that this would have
invited unwelcome inferences about the purpose of the experiment. We employed a
one-way ANOVA to examine the mean of the appraisal variable in the four treatment
groups. This analysis indicated that all means were not equal (F ¼ 5.13, p , 0.01).
A further examination, with Sheffé’s post hoc test, showed that the neutral male service
worker elicited a lower level of perceived happiness (M ¼ 6.46) than the smiling male Revisiting
service worker (M ¼ 7.47). This difference was significant ( p ¼ 0.06). Similarly, the the smiling
neutral female service worker elicited a lower level of perceived happiness (M ¼ 6.27)
than the smiling female service worker (M ¼ 7.25), and this difference was significant, service worker
too ( p ¼ 0.07). We therefore conclude that the smile manipulation was successful.

Assessing the hypotheses 561

To test the hypotheses, we used a two-way ANOVA with the service worker’s display
of smile and the sex of the service worker as factors. This analysis produced
a significant main effect of display of smile (F ¼ 20.30, p , 0.01, h 2 ¼ 0.09), a
non-significant main effect of the sex of the service worker (F ¼ 0.03, p ¼ 0.87,
h 2 , 0.01), and a non-significant interaction effect (F ¼ 0.77, p ¼ 0.38, h 2 , 0.01).
The service worker’s sex, then, did not affect customer satisfaction. The satisfaction
mean for the two neutral treatment groups (M ¼ 5.37) was lower than the satisfaction
mean for the two smile treatment groups (M ¼ 6.44), so we conclude that an encounter
with a smiling service worker produced a higher level of customer satisfaction than
an encounter with a neutral service worker (regardless of the service worker’s sex).
H1 thus received support; H2 did not receive support[1].

Examining associations between variables

We used a structural equation model approach to assess the links between the variables
discussed in the theoretical section (and summarized in Figure 1). That is to say, these
links served as the proposed model, and we assessed it with maximum likelihood
procedures (in AMOS 7). Given the non-significant impact of the service worker’s sex on
customer satisfaction (see above), we pooled the data from the treatments groups and
conducted the subsequent analyses by including the treatment in the proposed model in
terms of a variable representing the service worker’s display of smile. This variable was
scored in terms of two values (1 ¼ neutral facial expression, 2 ¼ smiling facial
expression), and it was modeled as linked to the participants’ appraisals of the service
worker’s overall emotional state (Link 1) and to the customer’s own positive emotions
(Link 2). Several authors have called for the use of SEM on experimental data
(MacKenzie, 2001), particularly when the data involve multiple latent variables (Cole
et al., 1993), and similar attempts to explicitly incorporate treatment variables in a SEM
framework are, for example, Baker et al. (2002), Hui and Bateson (1991), Kidwell and
Jewell (2003) and Söderlund and Rosengren (2004).
The zero-order correlations are presented in Table I. It can be noted that the
customer’s emotions variable (i.e. joy) was positively and significantly associated with

1 2 3 4

1. SW’s display of smile

2. Appraisal of the SW’s emotional state 0.25
3. Customers’ positive emotions (joy) 0.24 0.34
4. Attitude toward the SW 0.25 0.59 0.61 Table I.
5. Customer satisfaction 0.29 0.33 0.78 0.66 Zero-order correlation
between the variables
Note: All p , 0.01 in the proposed model
IJSIM customer satisfaction (r ¼ 0.78, p , 0.01), suggesting that these two variables may tap
19,5 into the same construct and thus questioning the discriminant validity of the two
measures. A confirmatory factor analysis, however, revealed that a two-factor model
with one satisfaction variable (and three indicators) and one joy variable (also with
three indicators) provided a very good fit (x 2 ¼ 13.53, df ¼ 8, p ¼ 0.095,
CFI ¼ 0.995, NFI ¼ 0.987, RMSEA ¼ 0.056). And when we compared the
562 two-factor model to a one-factor model, in which all six indicators were modeled as
tapping into the same construct, the two-factor model provided a significantly better fit
( p , 0.01). Moreover, the overall fit indicators of the one-factor models were so poor
that they would be considered unacceptable. Despite the high zero-order correlation
between joy and satisfaction, then, we believe that they capture distinct constructs.
We obtained a good level of fit for the proposed model (x 2 ¼ 89.15, df ¼ 39,
p , 0.01, CFI ¼ 0.968, NFI ¼ 0.946, RMSEA ¼ 0.077). Moreover, all path
coefficients for the indicators in the multi-item measures were significant ( p , 0.01
in each case) thus indicating convergent validity in these measures. The standardized
path coefficients for the links in the proposed model are presented in Table II, which
reveals that all expected links were positive and significant at the 1 percent level.

Rival models
To examine the proposed model further, we assessed some rival models which we
nested within the proposed model. First, we have argued that the customer’s appraisal
of the service worker’s emotional state would contribute to emotional contagion, and
thus that the way in which others’ emotions are contagious may involve more than
only an automatic mimicking of another person’s facial muscle movements. Therefore,
we examined a rival model in which the link between the appraisal and the customer’s
own positive emotions (Link 3 in Figure 1) was restricted to be zero. This alternative
model, however, produced a significantly lower level of fit than the proposed model
(df ¼ 1, d x 2 ¼ 19.99, p , 0.01). Yet when we assessed another alternative model, this
time by setting the direct link between the smile variable and the customer’s positive
emotions (i.e. Link 2) to zero, the fit of the proposed model decreased, too ðdf ¼ 1;
dx 2 ¼ 9:74; p , 0:01Þ: It thus appears as if the customer’s positive emotions were
affected both by the appraisal of the service worker’s emotional state and by the
service worker’s display of smile. Our notion of appraisals should thus not be seen as
the only factor affecting one’s own emotions – but as a factor that contributes
significantly to the contagion process. It can also be noted that our significant smile
behavior-customer positive emotions link (Link 2; b ¼ 0.21, p , 0.01) is in contrast
to what both Barger and Grandey (2006) and Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) found;

Link 1: display of smile ! appraisal of service worker’s emotional state 0.25 *

Link 2: display of smile ! the customer’s positive emotions 0.21 *
Link 3: appraisal of service worker’s emotional state ! the customer’s positive emotions 0.31 *
Link 4: the customer’s positive emotions ! attitude toward the service worker 0.70 *
Link 5: the customer’s positive emotions ! customer satisfaction 0.66 *
Table II. Link 6: appraisal of service worker’s emotional state ! attitude toward the service worker 0.25 *
Standardized path Link 7: attitude toward the service worker ! customer satisfaction 0.31 *
coefficients in the
proposed model Note: *p , 0.01
in their studies, the link between smiling behavior and the customer’s emotions was Revisiting
non-significant (but this may be a function of measurement aspects in their studies, the smiling
an issue which we return to below).
Second, we argued that existing studies (Barger and Grandey, 2006; Söderlund and service worker
Rosengren, 2004; Söderlund and Rosengren, 2007) of how the service worker’s smiling
behavior affects customer satisfaction through mediating variables have left out the
customer’s evaluation of the service worker – and this omission is likely to conceal 563
important aspects, because of the salient role of the service worker in service
encounters. To examine the relevance of the evaluation of the service worker, then, we
assessed an alternative model in which the three links involving the attitude toward
the service worker (Link 4, 6, and 7) were restricted to be zero. This alternative model
produced a significantly lower level of fit (df ¼ 3, d x 2 ¼ 200.92, p , 0.01) than the
proposed model, which serves to strengthen our belief that the evaluation of the service
worker is an important component of the satisfaction formation process.
Third, we claimed that the customer’s own positive emotions, through affect
infusion, may have an impact on the evaluation of both the service worker and the firm
in which the service worker is employed. The standardized coefficients for these two
links in Table II (Link 4; b ¼ 0.70 and Link 5; b ¼ 0.66) indicate that affect infusion
occurred with respect to both objects – and that both links had about the same
strength. We then assessed the extent to which these two links are of equal strength by
examining another alternative model in which the two links were restricted to be equal,
which resulted in that the fit did not change in relation to the proposed model (df ¼ 1,
d x 2 ¼ 0.46, p ¼ 0.50). This outcome, we believe, illustrates that one emotion-evoking
object (here: the service worker) may indeed influence evaluations of not only the same
object, but also evaluations of related objects (here: the firm).
Moreover, and in the light of an increasing number of studies underscoring the
contribution of emotions in evaluation processes, particularly in terms of affect
infusion, we examined an additional alternative model in which we restricted the four
links involving the customer’s own positive emotions (Link 2, 3, 4 and 5) to be zero. The
alternative model thus represents a “cold” cognition-based evaluation process. This
alternative model, however, reduced the fit significantly (df ¼ 4, d x 2 ¼ 262.03,
p , 0.01) to a level considered unacceptable by existing SEM standards (x 2 ¼ 351.81,
df ¼ 39, p , 0.01, CFI ¼ 0.81, NFI ¼ 0.79, RMSEA ¼ 0.18). In the present case, it
thus seems imperative to include the customer’s emotions to better capture how
satisfaction is influenced. This particular finding should be seen in the light of many
authors who during recent years have stressed the fundamental contribution of
emotions to our understanding of the psychology of human beings. Russell (2003,
p. 145) captures this argument well when he states that psychology and humanity can
progress without considering emotions – about as fast as someone running on one leg.
Finally, an essential thesis in this paper – and in studies such as Barger and
Grandey (2006), Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) and Söderlund and Rosengren (2004) – has
been that the impact of the service worker’ smile behavior on customer satisfaction is
mediated rather than direct. To assess this, we did as follows. We set up a new model
containing the original seven links in Figure 1 and one additional link: a direct link
between the smile variable and customer satisfaction. This resulted in a very weak and
non-significant coefficient for the direct link (b ¼ 0.02, p ¼ 0.54), which we interpret as
support for mediated models of the impact of smiles on satisfaction.
IJSIM Discussion
19,5 Summary of main findings
We found that the service worker produced a higher level of customer satisfaction
when she/he smiled compared to when she/he did not, and our analyses suggest that
this outcome was mediated by the customer’s appraisal of the service worker’s overall
emotional state, the customer’s own positive emotions, and the attitude toward the
564 service worker in a process comprising both emotional contagion and affect infusion.

Contributions
The findings should be seen in relation to some previous research on the
smile-satisfaction which has indicated that the service worker’s smiling behavior
has no effect on customer satisfaction under the (implicit) assumption that no
mediating variables are involved (Brown and Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994). Our findings thus
offer further support of a general notion of mediation identified in studies such as
Barger and Grandey (2006), Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006) and Söderlund and Rosengren
(2004). These studies, however, have left out the overall evaluation of the service
worker. This omission is somewhat inconsistent, we believe, with the general notion in
the service literature regarding the importance of the customer’s impressions of the
service worker in the service encounter. Moreover, to capture this evaluation, we used
an attitude variable which rarely appears in service literature, yet it is prevalent in
marketing literature dealing with objects such as the ad, the advertiser, and the brand.
Indeed, we think that the performance of this variable in the present study suggests
that it may be a useful complement to service worker-related variables in service
research, and we believe that a more frequent use of this variable in service settings
would allow service researchers to capitalize on the vast attitude literature in other
marketing-related fields. Our results also indicate that the dominant facial-feedback
hypothesis regarding emotional contagion can be complemented with an
appraisal-based explanation to provide a richer account of how one person’s
emotions come to be transferred to another person in a social setting. And, perhaps
more important, our results offer further evidence that emotions do play an important
role in evaluations.
There are also some measurement-related aspects of the present study that we
believe may offer contributions to existing literature. First, with regard to the
customer’s positive emotions, it should be recalled that we focused on one particular
emotion (joy). And we found a positive and significant association between the service
worker’s smile behavior and this specific customer emotion (Link 2 in our model). It can
be noted that Hennig-Thurau et al. (2006), who failed to find a link between the service
worker’s smiling behavior and the customer’s positive emotions, used a positive affect
measure with high arousal adjectives (e.g. excited and enthusiastic), which, together
with our findings, indicates that the impact of smiling behavior on the customer’s
positive emotions may be restricted to relatively less arousing positive emotional states
(such as joy). Moreover, Barger and Grandey (2006), who also failed to find a
significant link between the service worker’s smile behavior and the customer’s
emotions, employed an emotion measure in which a low-arousing positive emotion
(contented) was mixed with a high arousing positive emotion (excited). The Barger and
Grandey (2006) approach should be seen in relation to emotion theorists who argue
strongly against lumping together different positive emotions under the same
amalgamated label, because different discrete positive emotions are likely to have Revisiting
different antecedents and consequences (Moore and Isen, 1990; Roesch, 1999). Different the smiling
positive emotions are also experienced with different strength in daily life (Zelenski
and Larsen, 2000). Therefore, it is possible that the results in Barger and Grandey service worker
(2006) were contaminated by a positive emotion measure comprising several (different)
aspects. Again, then, and together with our own findings, this implies that smiles may
not be a panacea for inducing all sorts of positive emotions. Second, and in contrast to 565
several previous studies of the smile-satisfaction link with ad hoc satisfaction measures
(Barger and Grandey, 2006; Brown and Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994; Grandey et al., 2005;
Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006), our results were obtained with the perhaps most prevalent
satisfaction measure that exists today. In the sense that our satisfaction measure was
different, yet provided results supporting previous attempts to come to terms with the
smile-satisfaction link in mediation terms, we believe that we have added more
evidence in favor of this type of mediation reasoning. And in the sense that our
satisfaction measure has been widely used in analyses of other antecedents to
satisfaction than smiles, and in analyses of several consequences of satisfaction
(Fornell, 1992; Johnson et al., 2001), we believe that we may have somewhat facilitated
the task of understanding the increasingly rich nomological network of customer
satisfaction.

Implications for practice – and for the scope of service research

Our findings suggest that the received view in many service firms regarding the
importance of smiles in service encounters appears to be valid. Given that a service firm
wishes to boost customer satisfaction, then, our findings suggest that smiling service
workers will add to customer satisfaction. Exactly what management should do in order
to induce such smiles, however, is a knotty issue. It seems clear that simple rules of the
“Smile!” type may create problems (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2003).
Forcing an employee to act as if he or she is in a positive emotional state, for example,
may create dissonance and exhaustion, which in turn “leaks out” in a service encounter
and affects the customer negatively (Grandey, 2003). Ultimately, then, the main way to
obtain frequent and real smiles is likely to require the creation of an organizational
setting which fosters genuine positive emotions among employees. That is to say, if
emotions are contagious not only in the service worker-customer relationship, but also in
the service worker’s relationships with persons in his/her organization (Normann, 2000),
factors related to such relationships – in terms of organizational design, climate, and
culture – become important for the manager who is interested in enhancing the overall
positive emotional charge in an organization. Indeed, it has been shown that such
internal relationships are affecting not only job satisfaction but also employees’ capacity
to satisfy customers (Sergeant and Frenkel, 2000).
Given the impact of the service worker’s behavior in the service encounter for the
customer’s overall impressions of the service firm, many authors have also stressed the
importance of recruitment activities (Bendapudi and Bendapudi, 2005; Normann, 2000),
and it indeed seems as if such activities call for attention in efforts to produce more
smiles among employees. More specifically, people are subject to variation in how
happy they are, and the way in which they express emotions, and those who – prior to
any training program – are relatively more positively charged are of course, the best
candidates for a firm who seriously wishes to exploit the smile-satisfaction link.
IJSIM The notion of selecting “the best candidate” in terms of affective traits and
19,5 emotional display behavior, however, invites questions about the service firm and its
relations to and impact on society. Unemployment is a major concern in many
countries, while the service sector offers a crucial part of all employment opportunities
– and people are already struggling to adapt to copious employer demands when they
seek employment. So to include a general positive charge in the list of required
566 characteristics may add further barriers to a substantial number of people whose
overriding wish is to get a job. In addition, it can be noted that there are strong reasons
to believe that people have no direct access to the causal connection between their
emotions and evaluations, because the link is more or less automatic (Russell, 2003).
This means that manipulation-related questions can be raised with regard to an
approach in which smiling service workers are a component to boost customer
satisfaction. In other words, some observers may feel that smile behavior is yet another
hidden persuasion tactic to influence customers. Indeed, such issues, thus dealing with
the societal implications of service management activities, deserve attention by service
researchers in the same way as marketing scholars have addressed societal concerns
regarding advertising (Pollay, 1986). It can be noted that when Farmer (1967) asked
“Would you want your daughter to marry a marketing man?”, his own answer, because
of the potential for many negative effects of marketing, was not a straight-forward
“Yes”. If it becomes a prevalent practice to employ only happy persons to capitalize on
a smile-satisfaction link, and given the hidden persuasion aspects of the link, one
wonders what the answer to this question would be: would you want your children to
marry a service firm manager?

Limitations and suggestions for further research

One limitation is that we focused only on the service worker’s smiling behavior. It is
clear, however, that other aspects of the service worker’s behavior may have an
emotion-inducing potential. Barger and Grandey (2006) failed to find a significant link
between such as aspects as:
.
greeting, eye contact and farewell; and
.
customer emotions, yet several other aspects (such as trustworthiness, expertise,
empathy, and friendliness) are suggested by Lee and Dubinsky (2003).

Some researchers have also found such effects of “affective service behaviors”, a
variable for which smiling behavior is lumped together with behaviors such as
greeting, thanking, and eye contact (Luong, 2005). Further research should therefore
make a serious attempt to examine the contribution of smiles to the customer’s
emotions when other aspects of service worker behavior are taken into account. It can
also be noted that several authors acknowledge that genuine smiles (a.k.a. Duchenne
smiles), as opposed to faked smiles, are likely to produce favorable effects on customers
in service encounters (Söderlund and Rosengren, 2004; Grandey et al., 2005). Some
authors have explicitly controlled for this factor (Söderlund and Rosengren, 2004;
Grandey et al., 2005), and our lack of control in the present study is a limitation. Yet we
believe that the positive and significant link between our smile variable and the
appraisal of the service worker’s overall emotional state (i.e. Link 1 in Figure 1) signals
that the stimulus persons’ smiles in our study were perceived to be genuine. In
addition, as already mentioned, our manipulation check item dealt with an assumed
consequence (perceived happiness) of smile behavior rather than smile behavior itself. Revisiting
On theoretical grounds, we assumed that a smiling person would be perceived as the smiling
happier than a non-smiling person (and this is also the results we got). This way of
conducting checks is following the argument of Wetzel (1977); manipulation checks service worker
assess the impact of the independent variable as the experimenter theoretically views
this impact. But the manipulation check would of course, have been more distinct if it
had comprised items directly related to the smile behavior itself. Whatever items are 567
used, however, it is always a source of potential bias to include such items in the main
experiment, because check items can contaminate the responses to the dependent
variable (if the check comes before the dependent variable) or invite a need to produce a
response to the check item consistent with the response to the dependent variable (if the
dependent variable comes first, as in our case). The optimal approach is perhaps to
obtain check measures from additional groups for which the dependent variable is not
measured at all (Perdue and Summers, 1986; Kidd, 1977), yet this approach calls for
additional participants.
Another limitation is that our measure of the customer’s positive emotions was
restricted to one particular positive emotion (joy). Although we believe that smiling
behavior is inducing more of joy than other positive emotions, there are indeed other
positive emotions that may (or may not) be affected by smiling behavior. As already
indicated, researchers seeking to explore the full gamut of emotions need to pay attention to
emotion theorists who argue that it may not be useful to lump together all sorts of positive
emotions under the same amalgamated label (Moore and Isen, 1990; Roesch, 1999).
Unfortunately, however, some service and marketing researchers who wish to capture
customers’ emotions appear to be out of step with such arguments. In any case, researchers
interested in the customer’s emotional reactions should pay close attention to what specific
emotion they are actually measuring. Richins (1997) is an example of a study providing
different emotion subscales for different discrete emotions, so attempts to distinguish
between different emotions in measurement terms do exist. It may be added that methods
such as structural equation modeling, which have become increasingly popular, offer many
useful tools for assessing measurement validity, but they do not reduce the researcher’s
responsibility to consider the extent to which a set of questions corresponds with what
theory has to say about the content of the relevant construct (i.e. content validity).
Moreover, our setting involved a dyadic interaction between one service worker and
one customer. And in this setting, we focused on the customer’s reactions. Yet the service
worker can of course, experience emotions, too. Recent research has shown that the
customer’s emotions can evoke emotional reactions in the service worker through
emotional contagion (Dallimore et al., 2007), so a complete model of what is happening in
emotional terms in a service encounter dyad needs to consider both parties. Other settings
beyond the dyadic exchange also exist. For example, sometimes one customer interacts
with several service workers and sometimes the customer is in a group (such as a family).
Given that emotions are contagious, we expect them to be so also in other settings than
those comprising a dyad. In addition, the results in Tombs and McColl-Kennedy (2005)
indicate that the emotions displayed by other customers who happen to be present affect
the customer’s emotions in the service encounter, so allowing for group-related emotional
contagion is indeed an aspect that merits attention in further research.
Finally, it is worth noting that the setting in which our smile manipulations
were made represents a fairly high level of service performance. Previous authors
IJSIM (Grandey et al., 2005) have suggested that it is precisely under this high-performance
19,5 condition in which we would expect that the service worker’s smiling behavior
contributes positively to the customer satisfaction. This means that little is known
about the display of smiles in situations where performance is low. Indeed, the
combination of various level of smiling behavior and performance levels invites
interesting questions, such as if a smiling and low performing service worker would be
568 able to produce satisfaction to the same extent as when she/he is non-smiling. The
results in Mattila et al. (2003) suggest that smiles in a service failure situation may
actually boost customer satisfaction somewhat compared to a negative affective
display, yet one can easily think of situations when low performance and a smile can
be offensive and irritating. One can also think of situations in which high-service
performance may not be congruent with smiles (e.g. funeral services and intensive
care). So before further research is conducted, we should not treat the service worker’s
smile as a panacea for customer satisfaction.

Note
1. Although not hypothesized, and not subject to much theorizing in existing service literature
(Mattila et al., 2003), it is possible that the customer’s sex may affect the results, too
(e.g. a male customer may react differently when he interacts with a smiling male service
worker compared to a smiling female service worker). To assess this aspect, we re-tested the
two hypotheses by including also the customer’s sex as a factor. This 2 £ 2 £ 2 ANOVA,
however, produced a non-significant impact of the customer’s sex and non-significant
interactions in which this variable was involved. Indeed, in this ANOVA, the main effect of
the smile variable was the only significant effect. In our case, it can be noted that service was
produced at a relatively high performance level in all treatment groups. It therefore
resembles the “typical encounter” condition used by Mattila et al. (2003) who also identified
a non-significant difference in satisfaction between men and women. Given service at a
relatively high level, then, our results regarding the absence of an impact of the customer’s
sex on satisfaction are consonant with the results in Mattila et al. (2003).

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Appendix. The scenario text (the male service worker version)

You are thinking about going abroad for a short holiday. And you would like to go to a warm
and sunny place somewhere in the Mediterranean area. This idea has been in your mind for some
time, but you have not done anything about it. Well, now you pass a travel agency that you have
heard about before – it is a well-known firm – and you see in the window that they have tickets
to several places in the Mediterranean area. So you decide to go in. A sales representative is free
and you approach him.
“Hello, what can I do for you?” he asks.
“Well, I am thinking about going to some place by the Mediterranean Sea. Maybe to Corsica;
I saw in the window that you seem to have good prices at the moment for those trips”, you say.
“That’s right”, he says. “Our trips go to Calvi, a town on the northwestern coast of Corsica.
We cooperate with several hotels in this town. Several price levels are available.”
“OK. How long does the trip to Calvi take?”, you ask.
“It takes about three hours to fly to Bastia, the major town on Corsica. Then the bus ride from
Bastia to Calvi takes about an hour and forty-five minutes”.
”Hmm . . . ” you say. ”It seems as if the bus trip is pretty long”.
“Well”, he responds, “Corsica is actually an island with short distances if you consider them
on the map, but it is a mountainous island. So the bus has to adapt to the existing roads. In fact,
the bus trip is really nice – it goes through a hilly area. We have air condition on our busses.
And we’ll tell you some facts about Corsica while you are on the bus.”
“I see”, you say. “Corsica . . . it is French-speaking, right? I am afraid that my French is not
very good.”
IJSIM “C’est bon si vous parlez un peu”, he says in perfect French. “But in all hotels that we cooperate
with there are English-speaking staff. And they’ll be happy to assist if any problems
19,5 should arise”.
“OK”, you say, “let me think about this for a while”.
He gives you some leaflets about Corsica, a map of the island, a map of Calvi, and says that
you are welcome to return when you have considered what to do.

574
Corresponding author
Magnus Söderlund can be contacted at: Magnus.Soderlund@hhs.se

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