An empirical investigation of how interpersonal similarity influences customers' crowding perceptions in services contexts

Abstract

Crowding is a common phenomenon in services and is detrimental to customer experience. How to alleviate the perceptions of crowding, particularly when the physical service environment cannot be improved, represents a challenge for practitioners. Drawing from the social impact theory, we investigate how customers’ crowding perceptions in a high customer density environment can be mitigated by interpersonal similarity through a decreased perception of transgression of comfortable interpersonal distance. We further show that interpersonal similarity contributes to alleviate crowding perceptions only when the interpersonal similarity is positive or desired by the customer and when the similarity is perceived to be important.