Abstract
Previous research has investigated many dimensions of service failure, which mainly focused on the interactions between employees and individual customers. The extant literature, however, has paid scant attention to service failure occurring in the context of group consumption. Specifically, this research aims to explore the psychological process underlying consumers’ experiences and responses during service failure that happens in group consumption. Given that this research area is under-investigated, this research plans to adopt the critical incident technique as the major research methodology. The results provide individual consumers’ affective and cognitive process during group service failure and examine how members in one’s group affect one’s service failure experience. This research also provides insight into expected contribution of theory and management during group service failure.