چه کسی از نکاتی به عنوان پاداش برای خدمات استفاده می کند و چه زمانی ؟ بررسی مدیران بالقوه ارتباط خدمات-انعام

Consumers in many countries often give voluntary payments of money (tips) to the workers who have served them. These tips are supposed to be a reward for service and research indicates that they do increase with customers’ perceptions of service quality. This paper contributes to the service–tipping literature by examining numerous potential moderators of this relationship in two studies. Results indicate that the service–tipping relationship is robust across meal type, day of week, sex and race of server as well as customers’ alcohol consumption, education, income, race, worship frequency, and hospitality work experience, but that it is stronger for older consumers than for younger ones and for parties with large bills than for parties with smaller bills. The practical and theoretical implications of these and other findings are discussed.

Consumers in many countries often leave voluntary sums of money (tips) for workers in the service industry who have served them. Among the many service workers commonly tipped are bartenders, barbers, concierges, cruise cabin stewards, delivery drivers, doormen, exotic dancers, golf caddies, hotel maids, musicians, parking valets, porters, restaurant waiters, taxicab drivers, and tour guides (Star, 1988). Although the amounts given by a single customer to any one worker are typically modest, they are not negligible. For example, tipping typically increases the cost of dining out by 10–16% and often increases the costs of taxicab rides by 7–12% depending on the country in which the service occurs (Lynn & Lynn, 2004). Moreover, the total amount tipped to all workers is substantial with one estimate placing the annual tips in the United States alone at over $45 billion (Azar, 2011a). Understanding the motivations, causes, and processes underlying this behavior is important from both a practical and theoretical perspective. From a practical perspective, tipping affects the perceptions and experiences of consumers (Lynn & Withiam, 2008), the incomes, attitudes, and behaviors of service workers (Kwortnik et al., 2009, Lynn, 2002 and Lynn et al., 2001), and ultimately the performance and profitability of service firms (Azar, 2011a, Lynn and Withiam, 2008 and Schwartz, 1997). A better understanding of the determinants of tipping would inform consumers’ efforts to reform the practice (May, 1980), servers’ efforts to increase their incomes (Lynn, 2011), service managers’ efforts to train and motivate their employees (Azar, 2004a; Lynn, 2005), and executives’ efforts to expand into new geographic markets and to set optimal pricing and tipping policies (Azar, 2003, Lynn, 2004 and Lynn and Withiam, 2008). From the perspective of neoclassical economic theory, tipping appears to be irrational (Lynn, 2006 and Saunders and Lynn, 2010). Tips are not legally required and are not given until after service is delivered, so they are not necessary to ensure good current service. If tip sizes are made contingent on service quality they could be used to buy future service, but repeated failures to find a service quality by patronage frequency interaction effect on tip size undermines this potential rational explanation for tipping (Azar, 2009, Conlin et al., 2003 and Lynn and McCall, 2000) as does the fact that people tip in establishments they will never revisit (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986). An adequate explanation of tipping must go beyond a rational economic motivation and embrace psychological motivations such as desires to reward good service, help servers, and gain social approval or status (Lynn, 2006 and Saunders and Lynn, 2010). A better understanding of the motivations and causes underlying tipping would inform economists’ and other scholars’ attempts to build more realistic and comprehensive theories and models of consumer behavior.

Tipping is supposed to be a reward for service, so tip amounts should and do increase with customers’ perceptions of service quality (Azar, 2009 and Lynn and McCall, 2000). Although isolated findings from previous research suggested that this relationship may be stronger on weekdays than weekends (Conlin, Lynn & O’Donoghue, 2003), for dinner meals than lunch meals (Lynn & Simons, 2000), for waiters than waitresses (Lynn & Simons, 2000), for white servers than black servers (Lynn, Sturman, Ganley, Adams, Douglas & McNeil, 2008), among those who attend religious services less frequently (Lynn and Katz, in press), and among Asian and Hispanic consumers than White consumers (Lynn & Thomas-Haysbert, 2003), the current studies failed to replicate these interaction effects. In addition, several potential moderators of the service–tipping relationship tested here for the first time – customers’ hospitality work experience, alcohol consumption, conscientiousness, agreeableness, education and income – also failed to interact significantly with service ratings. Of course, null results could be due to lack of statistical power, so firm conclusions about these potential moderators are not yet possible. Nevertheless, the overall picture to emerge from these studies is that the service–tipping relationship is fairly robust and may not vary in strength as much as the previous literature suggests. Three variables that did moderate the service–tipping relationship in these studies were customer sex, customer age, and bill size. Each is discussed in greater detail below. Customer sex moderated the effects of service on tipping in both of the current studies, but the direction of the moderation effect was inconsistent. In Study 1, the effects of service were stronger when the customer was female, but in Study 2, the effects of service were stronger when the customer was male. The latter effect is consistent with and may be attributed to a tendency for men to prefer performance based distributions of rewards more than do women (Austin and McGinn, 1977 and Dickinson and Tiefenthaler, 2002), but the former effect suggests that customer sex may influence tipping in other ways as well. Clearly, the interaction of customer sex and service deserves further investigation in future research. Another variable that moderated the service–tipping relationship in Study 2 was customer age. Of particular interest was the finding that older consumers were more likely than younger consumers to punish bad service with small tips (compared to those they give for average service). This finding is consistent with that of Lynn and Katz (in press) if respondents in their study interpreted what was described as “good service” as normal or average, as seems likely given the fact that the average consumer rating of restaurant service is very positive (see Lynn, 2000). Given research showing that older consumers are also less likely than younger consumers to be concerned with impressing servers or tipping for self-presentational reasons (Lynn, 2009), it makes sense that older consumers would be more likely to risk server disapproval by punishing bad service with lower tips. This effect was not found in Study 1, but the variance in age was much smaller in that study than in Study 2 (standard deviations = 3.37 vs. 16.09 respectively), so this failure to replicate is neither surprising nor informative. Arguably the most important variable to moderate the service–tipping relationship was bill size. Tip amounts increased with service more strongly the larger the customers’ bill sizes in both Studies 1 and 2. This effect is consistent with relative thinking theory (Azar, 2007c), which posits that people consider relative differences between prices rather than absolute differences when making economic decisions. Most of the previous evidence supporting relative thinking comes from hypothetical scenarios and a previous “real world” test failed to find evidence for it, leading the authors to suggest that “financial incentives might alleviate relative thinking” (Azar, 2010). Our finding in Study 1 suggests that conclusion was premature – relative thinking does occur in the face of financial incentives in the real world. From a practical perspective, relative thinking in general and our findings in particular mean that servers interested in earning more tips should devote a disproportionate share of their selling and service efforts to those dining parties they know or expect to have larger bills, because the marginal return on those efforts will be greater the larger the bill size. Although not the primary focus of this paper, we also found that tip amounts after controlling for bill size increased with the amount of time customers spent on the meal occasion and that this increase was itself larger the smaller the dining parties’ bill sizes. This is the first study that we know of to test and observe these effects. They are important because they suggest that consumers think about and voluntarily compensate servers for the opportunity costs that their lingering imposes on servers. Of course, it is not clear that this compensation matches the true value of the lost opportunity to seat and server other customers, but it should help to make servers more tolerant of customers who take their time eating and leaving. In conclusion, tips are supposed to be a reward for service. Consistent with this function, we found that restaurant tip amounts increased with perceived service quality and that this relationship was robust across meal type, day of week, sex and race of server as well as customers’ alcohol consumption, education, income, race, worship frequency, and hospitality work experience. However, service quality did have a bigger effect for parties with large bills than for those with smaller bills. In addition to providing evidence for relative thinking in the face of real world financial incentives, this finding suggests that servers interested in earning larger tips should devote a disproportionate share of their selling and service efforts to those dining parties they know or expect to have larger bills. Overall, these and other findings of the study suggest that although tipping is not “rational” in the economic sense, it is orderly and understandable from a psychological perspective. Hopefully, this paper will encourage more economists to adopt that perspective when they study this and other topics.