A Multicultural Service Sensitivity Exercise for Marketing Students

Abstract

Services marketing and retailing courses place service quality at the heart of the curriculum, painting service providers as defenders of their customers’ welfare and thwarters of service failures by ushering in recovery solutions. Yet academic literature and the popular press provide evidence that in some cases, service providers act as discriminatory agents toward their own customers. Likewise, other customers in the servicescape can negatively influence a customer’s service quality experience. This article attempts to address shortcomings in services marketing textbooks and classroom discussions by providing educators with a multicultural service sensitivity exercise that they can employ in undergraduate, graduate, and executive MBA courses. The article offers educators an easy-to-implement, active learning exercise that shows students how many consumers fail to obtain quality service in the marketplace. The goal of the exercise is to help students develop an appreciation for diversity and understand how to manage a service setting so that all customers receive optimal service quality.

Keywords

multicultural education transformative learning multicultural sensitivity business ethics education teaching services marketing

Service quality is a dominant theme in services marketing courses. Indeed, services educators allocate a considerable amount of their course content to defining service quality (Zeithaml, Bitner, & Gremler, 2013), discussing its underlying dimensions, measuring these dimensions (Zeithaml & Parasuraman, 2004; Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Berry, 1990), exploring how firms can respond to service quality problems, and discussing how to implement recovery solutions (Lovelock, Wirtz, & Chew, 2009). As such, service quality classes tend to discuss services as time-perishable, intangible experiences that service providers offer to customers (Spohrer & Maglio, 2008). In doing so, educators place the onus of providing service quality, as well as implementing service recovery solutions, solely on service providers. Consequently, services texts tend to depict service providers as champions of egalitarian service quality, eager not only to offer reliability to all their customers but also to willingly implement corrective recovery solutions to perceived service failures.

Although many service providers are supportive of their customers’ welfare, examples in which service providers act as discriminatory agents toward their customers abound in services literature (Rosenbaum, Walsh, & Wozniak, 2012) but are largely absent from services textbooks (e.g., Lovelock et al., 2009; Zeithaml et al., 2013) and, thus, most classroom discussions. For example, in the following excerpt from Rosenbaum and Montoya (2007), a Hispanic male customer discusses a negative shopping experience that occurred with a retail employee whom he interpreted as racist and stereotypical toward Hispanics having low incomes:

I avoid some retail places, like Lord & Taylor. I avoid “status” places. Every time I’m in these stores, I’m shown to the clearance rack. I walk in the store, and within 30 seconds, I’m shifted over to the clearance rack. (p. 209)

In addition, the notion of other customers negatively influencing a customer’s service quality experience is often muted in major services textbooks and is absent from prominent service quality frameworks. That is, in key frameworks, such as service quality (Zeithaml et al., 1990), the service–profit chain (Heskett, Jones, Loveman, Sasser, & Schlesinger, 1994), and return on marketing (Rust, Lemon & Zeithaml, 2004), researchers emphasize the role of service providers in affecting a customer’s perception of service quality, satisfaction, loyalty, or lifetime value but ignore the role of other customers in affecting a customer’s service experience.

Although some service textbooks support the notion that other customers may be repositories of life-enhancing support for other customers, especially among those who patronize commercial hangouts, or “third places” (Zeithaml et al., 2013), in-depth discussions on how other customers often tenaciously destroy customers’ service experiences are absent from services texts and classroom discussions. That is, although service students learn that customers can easily and unintentionally negatively affect other customers within service settings—by crowding, by bringing infants and young children into consumption settings, or by misreading/ignoring signage—examples of how customers may purposefully, and without rational reason, try to harm other customers and devastate their service experiences are absent from key services texts and service quality frameworks. For example, the following excerpt from Rosenbaum and Montoya (2007) illustrates the grim reality that homosexual customers are often openly taunted by other customers, while service employees remain indifferent to their plight:

My partner and I were at a restaurant looking at photos. So, we sat on the same side of a booth to spread the pictures out on the table. Our waitress came over and said that a customer told her that we were bothering her and that we should sit across from each other. I told the waitress to tell the customer, “No, we won’t move.’ Then, the waitress told me that it was restaurant policy that males couldn’t sit side-by-side. Well, we were hungry, so we moved. (p. 209)

The goal of this article is to address these shortcomings in services marketing curriculum, textbooks, and classroom discussions by providing services as well as retailing, hospitality, and fashion educators with a multicultural service sensitivity exercise. This exercise is ideal for educators actively involved in curriculum transformation within undergraduate, graduate, and executive MBA courses. Service marketing educators who employ this exercise in their service courses will also be adhering to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business’s (AACSB’s) commitment to the concept that diversity in people and ideas enhances students’ educational experience in every management education program (AACSB, 2010).

The plan for this article is as follows: First, we highlight contemporary service quality issues that consumers confront in the marketplace and that service researchers adhering to the burgeoning transformative service research paradigm emphasize (Ostrom et al., 2010). Second, we provide an overview of cultural diversity discussions in business education and marketing programs. Third, we introduce the multicultural service sensitivity exercise and provide instructions on how educators can lead a discussion with questions. Fourth, we present both humanistic and empirical evidence to demonstrate the positive impact of this exercise on students enrolled in a services marketing course. We conclude the article with additional insights into how the exercise applies to other major services topics, including servicescapes (Bitner, 1992), transformative service research (Ostrom et al., 2010), and service nepotism (Rosenbaum & Walsh, 2011).

We draw on the work of Bucher (2004), who defines diversity as “all the ways in which people are different. This includes individual, group, and cultural differences” (p. 1). Thus, diversity is a philosophical perspective that recognizes and appreciates cultural and congenital differences between and among people. In contrast, multiculturalism is the inclusion in scholarship, theory, concept, and fact of cultures that have been historically underrepresented in educational arenas as a result of race, ethnicity, culture, language, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and physical abilities and disabilities (Kitano, 1977). Thus, multicultural curriculum transformation represents a process by which educators examine the current content, pedagogy, curricular, and other academic policies of their courses and transform them to accommodate multiculturalism, often by employing practical exercises (Kitano, 1977). Therefore, the exercise presented in this article is applicable to educators striving to enhance diversity sensitivity or to those who desire to engage in a more in-depth curriculum transformation.

Literature Review

Negative Customer-to-Customer Experiences Diminish Service Quality Generalization

Although service academics agree that customers may positively and negatively influence each other within service settings, little attention has been paid to the reality that customers often display discriminatory covert (e.g., verbal harassment) and overt (e.g., negative stares) behaviors to other customers for no apparent reason other than to destroy their consumption experience. That is, the service discipline has realized that many service encounters fail because of “dysfunctional customers,” “customers from hell,” “problem customers,” or “jay customers” (Zeithaml et al., 2013, p. 169) but has failed to thoroughly explore the idea that customers may become problematic or dysfunctional simply because they recognize the presence of minority, stigmatized, or subcultural customers within their consumption settings.

For example, Turkish consumers residing in Koblenz, Germany, report being verbally heckled and physically assaulted by German teenagers in the marketplace (McCloud, 2004). In the United States, homosexual and Hispanic customers in service settings have often received verbal insults and negative glances from other customers to such an extent that they have learned to read a firm’s physical environment, or symbolic servicescape, in search of signs, symbols, and artifacts that help inform them that an organization welcomes their patronage (Rosenbaum, 2005; Rosenbaum & Montoya, 2007). That is, gay and lesbian customers may seek out and patronize firms that display a rainbow flag or pink triangle or are listed on a human rights campaign website as being gay friendly. Furthermore, both homosexual and Hispanic customers often evaluate a firm’s employee mix to determine whether their respective group is welcomed in the consumption setting (Rosenbaum & Montoya, 2007). Similarly, some customers entering service settings alone are often treated as second-class customers by other customers and employees, who perceive them as lonely and even disadvantaged by being single (Goodwin & Lockshin, 1992); most notably, service researchers have found loneliness among older aged and elderly widows, widowers, retirees, and empty nesters and that those displaying visible chronic illnesses, such as cancer or cardiovascular disease, often desire to be with others who are in “the same boat” (Rosenbaum, 2006).

Negative Service Providers–Customer Experiences Are Commonplace

Although service organizations are often lauded for their commitment to service quality and for designing and implementing service recovery solutions (Zeithaml et al., 2013), there is a “dark side” to service quality that does not garner attention in texts and classroom discussions. Indeed, transformative service researchers have noted that though services can and do contribute positively to consumer well-being, service organizations have ignored or even harmed consumer well-being in various ways, such as through their underservice to communities in need, top-down and patronizing style of service delivery, and, at times, degrading policies of segmentation and targeting (Fisk, 2009; Rosenbaum et al., 2011; Williams & Henderson, 2011).

Underprivileged consumers often report feeling degraded and marginalized by health care providers (Fisk, 2009; Newman & Vidler, 2006; Williams & Henderson, 2011); for example, prior research has shown that some nurses provide inferior service to obese patients (Camden, Brannan, & Davis, 2008). Some financial organizations also provide inferior service quality and restrict funds to ethnic small business owners (Bone, Williams, & Christensen, 2010). Furthermore, some grocery stores are often reluctant to open establishments in lower income areas, creating food deserts—essentially urban areas in which consumers lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up a healthful diet (Mitchell, 2011).

Retail firms, including their managerial, sales, and security staffs, often discriminate against consumers because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, or weight (King, Shapiro, Hebl, Singletary, & Turner, 2006; Rosenbaum & Walsh, 2011). For example, retail salespeople and security generally assume that African Americans are more likely than other consumers to steal merchandise; therefore, they are more likely to follow African American customers around the store or watch them more closely than their other customers (Schreer, Smith, & Thomas, 2009). In addition, Black and male customers often wait significantly longer than White and female customers at retail counters (Ainscough & Motley, 2000).

This discussion highlights the truism that customers do not receive equal levels of service, especially if they belong to a minority group within a particular society. Thus, service marketing frameworks that espouse that customer satisfaction is a function of employee satisfaction (Heskett et al., 1994); value, brand, and relationship equity (Vogel, Evanschitzky, & Ramaseshan, 2008); or price, product quality, and service quality (Zeithaml et al., 2013) are limited in their applicability to stigmatized, marginalized, and minority consumer groups.

We suggest that extant service frameworks have failed to address the bona fide reality that service quality is not afforded to all consumers equally and that both service providers and other customers are often the culprits in destroying a customer’s service experience. Consequently, services marketing, retailing, hospitality, and fashion students often fail to understand the magnitude of marketplace discrimination.

Exploring Diversity in Business and General Education

With this discussion, we are not suggesting that service academics have purposefully ignored service discrimination topics; rather, we believe that many educators assume that topics of this nature are discussed elsewhere in business education—most notably, in either multicultural management or business ethics courses. Unfortunately, neither of these courses addresses multicultural service discrimination or discrimination targeted at stigmatized, marginalized, or minority customers in retail/service-oriented settings.

Multicultural business courses typically address the AACSB (2010) directive regarding the importance of preparing students to work in a global environment and to understand cultural diversity among employees and customers (Fluck, Clouse, & Shooshtari, 2007; Gordon & Newburry, 2007). Understandably, international business and marketing courses strive to meet this AACSB requirement by encouraging students to develop beyond their ethnocentric tendencies and to understand the impact of cultural differences on consumption behaviors, most notably, by incorporating Hofstede’s (1980) cultural research into their classroom discussions (Bell, Connerley, & Cocchiara, 2009; Bisoux, 2010; Egan & Bendick, 2008).

Human resource courses tend to interpret the AACSB (2010) directive as encouraging students to learn how culture influences employees’ mental processing skills, such as their communication and listening abilities and their behaviors within teams (Day & Glick, 2000). Similarly, retailing courses provide discussions to help students develop a heightened sensitivity to diversity, especially as it pertains to employment. Thus, retailing authors have provided examples on how Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, and McDonald’s value employee diversity (Berman & Evans, 2010; Diamond & Litt, 2009), while ignoring discussions on the existence and maintenance of zero-tolerance policies regarding employee-to-customer discrimination.

Business ethics courses tend to incorporate diversity discussions into their coursework; however, the objectives of these discussions are often to increase students’ awareness of their cultural assumptions and biases by learning about others’ cultures and recognizing the importance of understanding diversity in the workforce in relation to both suppliers and customers and coworkers, subordinates, and managers (Hazen & Higby, 2005). For example, in a Legal Environment of Business course, students may draft an ethical policy from a business perspective that incorporates U.S. Constitution and international law or prepare business entry strategies regarding a specific foreign country (Cunningham, 2005; Gordon & Newburry, 2007).

Many business students also receive cultural diversity sensitivity training in their general education curriculum (Kulik & Roberson, 2008; Moore, Madison-Colmore, & Collins, 2005). For example, some universities support active diversity speaker programs, with the objective of teaching students how to respect cultural differences, recognize prejudice and discrimination, and exercise empathy (Kubal, Meyler, Stone, & Mauney, 2003). Other classes encourage students to share their ethnic heritage with others by describing family traditions as a means to minimize interpersonal distance among students (Cox, 2001; Walker, 1993). Although these collegiate-wide cultural diversity intentions are noteworthy, an inherent shortcoming of such diversity training is a lack of research on its long-term effects (Kulik & Roberson, 2008).

The Need for Multicultural Education in Services Marketing

The goal of multicultural education is to provide students with alternative motives to pursue diversity, including fairness, social justice, and reduction of poverty and inequality (Kulik & Roberson, 2008), especially with regard to better serving disadvantaged consumers during service exchanges (Fisk, 2009). Furthermore, multicultural education, within a services marketing course, adheres to the tenets of transformative service research, which represents a research paradigm that has garnered increased attention and importance by urging academics to engage in research that improves human well-being (Ostrom et al., 2010; Rosenbaum et al., 2011).

We design a multicultural service sensitivity exercise that meets this goal and transformative service research’s focus on well-being by sensitizing students to real-life service issues that they might confront as service managers. More specifically, the exercise encourages future service managers to understand how customers of differing race, ethnicity, culture, language, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and physical abilities and disabilities may experience discrimination in service settings from employees and customers. Last, the proposed exercise meets AACSB (2010) requirements for diversity training and heeds Wright, Bitner, and Zeithaml’s (1994) request for services educators to employ active learning exercises in their courses so that students can construct their own learning experiences.

The Multicultural Service Sensitivity Exercise

The following exercise fills a gap in service quality discussions and provides an opportunity for students to understand that (a) customers’ service experiences vary depending on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and physical appearance/handicap characteristics and (b) stigmatized, minority, or marginalized consumer groups are routinely subjected to marketplace discrimination. Table 1 illustrates 25 different types of customers in service settings who likely experience inferior service quality from both service providers and employees, especially in a North American context. Table 1 incorporates customer examples from the discriminatory-retailing literature (Rosenbaum et al., 2012), popular press articles (e.g., CNN’s documentary Shopping While Black), and television shows (e.g., ABC News, What Would You Do).

Table 1.

Examples of Marginalized, Minority, or Stigmatized Consumers Within Service Settings.

1. Three African American men shopping for clothing in a high-end specialty store, such as Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue

2. An obese person sitting in coach on a full airplane

3. A wheelchair-bound college student in a campus bar on a busy weekend

4. A Muslim family in traditional dress on a tour bus in New York City

5. Lesbian partners at a hospital in a state that bans same-sex marriage

6. A family from Mexico that speaks poor English in the emergency room of a hospital

7. A senior citizen with a bladder control issue at the Chicago Public Library

8. A person living with cancer, and showing visible signs of chemotherapy with hair loss, at a busy restaurant on a weekend day

9. A mentally challenged consumer purchasing a used car

10. A gay male couple shopping for a mattress together at Macy’s or Sears

11. A Down syndrome child in the play area of McDonald’s

12. A transgender female to male purchasing a suit at Macy’s or Nordstrom’s

13. A transgender male to female purchasing cosmetics at a department store

14. A Caucasian man asking for service in an African American barbershop

15. An overweight couple walking in a mall

16. An interracial couple enjoying a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner in Alabama

17. A group of Japanese tourists who do not understand English well at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida

18. A man in his 20s with tattoos on his neck and hands shopping in a specialty store

19. A woman in a fur coat and wearing a sparkling diamond ring shopping at Wal-Mart

20. A gay man in a straight bar versus a straight man in a gay bar

21. Muslim men with beards boarding a plane from Newark to Chicago

22. Vegan students at a university cafeteria located in a rural, Midwestern town

23. Senior citizens shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch

24. A group of two African American women and three African American men at a restaurant such as Cracker Barrel

25. An overweight woman lifting weights at a gym

Before implementing the exercise, the professor writes each example from Table 1 on an index card. The exercise commences with the professor dividing students into groups of two. Next, the professor asks each student group to select one card. After all students have selected a card, the professor begins the lecture by telling students that they will be asked to accomplish four tasks about the customer and setting illustrated on the index card. The first question asks students to list the types of discriminatory behaviors that other customers might direct toward the customer. The second question asks them to list the discriminatory behaviors that employees might direct toward the customer. The third question asks students to provide solutions to customer-to-customer discrimination. The fourth question asks students to provide solutions to employee-to-customer discrimination. Professors should reassure students that there are no correct or incorrect answers and should stress that students should answer the questions openly and honestly. Professors should also indicate that “nothing” can be an option for solving customer-to-customer discrimination.

The Emergent Service Quality Frameworks

The classroom discussion should then lead professors to create four frameworks, as Figure 1 illustrates. First, the discussion regarding customer-to-customer discrimination exposes the reality that service quality is not universal or necessarily guaranteed to all consumers. Indeed, students often accept many forms of intercustomer discrimination as natural and generally expected. For example, many students willingly state that they expect African American men, obese consumers, and children with Down syndrome to be recipients of negative glances, rude gestures, and avoidance behavior from other customers. This learning moment should help prove that service quality can often be destroyed by other customers and that stigmatized, minority, and marginalized consumers often have unpleasant service experiences.

Figure 1.

Emergent frameworks.

Second, because students would have discussed service quality before the exercise, they might assume that all service providers are dedicated to providing their customers with reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurance, and favorable tangible items. Yet, as they discuss how service employees can easily alter service quality, students should begin to realize that service employees are often discriminatory agents rather than champions of service equality. During this discussion, professors should emphasize that organizations typically do not sanction discrimination behaviors toward customers and that many maintain zero tolerance for these behaviors; however, exceptions exist. For example, Cracker Barrel has openly discriminated against homosexual employees (Day & Greene, 2008) and African Americans (Massey, 2011). In this case, frontline employees may have agreed with senior management that people belonging to stigmatized, marginalized, or minority groups truly deserve inferior service quality, including extremely poor and disproportionate service relative to other customers, segregated seating, racial slurs, threats of bodily harm, and offensive physical contact.

Third, the discussion leads to exploring possible solutions to the discriminatory actions lodged by customers and employees toward other customers. Indeed, after discussing examples of discriminatory practices in service settings, most students should surmise that firms need to maintain zero-tolerance policies regarding employee-to-customer discrimination and should maintain ethical treatment of all customers as a corporate directive. Furthermore, students should realize that employees can learn tolerance by engaging in diversity training, especially training that involves role-playing. Yet the reality exists that for employees to provide equal service quality to all customers, senior management must also act as role models and mentors in championing service quality for all.

Fourth, the discussion ends with students discussing how management might prevent customer-to-customer discrimination. Although a possible solution might be for management to attempt to maintain a vigilant approach to stop customers from bearing the brunt of discriminatory actions from other customers, most students understand that this solution is limited in its effectiveness. In addition, students might suggest that managers apologize to customers for other customers’ discriminatory actions; however, this response does not quell hurt emotions. Also, students might recommend that organizations increase staffing levels so that customer-to-customer interaction is limited; yet this option is expensive. Consequently, the discussion might end with students grasping the reality that it is almost impossible for an organization to prevent discrimination from customers to other customers.

Expanding Into Other Diversity Areas

Educators can then choose to continue this multicultural discussion by introducing Bitner’s (1992) servicescape framework (Rosenbaum & Massiah, 2011). Although Bitner conceived of signs, symbols, and artifacts as consisting of tangible items affecting all customers equally, educators could discuss how servicescapes can be manipulated to offer welcoming messages to groups of marginalized, minority, or ethnic consumers. In addition, educators could opt to employ this exercise when they discuss employees’ roles in service delivery, value coproduction and codestruction, or experiential marketing. Educators could also discuss how service establishments employ symbols in consumption settings to attract specific groups of customers as a result of discrimination. For example, gay bars, African American barbershops, Jewish delicatessens, and Hispanic grocery stores all employ a “symbolic servicescape” (Rosenbaum, 2005) to attract specific clientele to their establishments (for specific exercises, see Rosenbaum & Massiah, 2012).

Services educators could also attempt to expand on this discussion by drawing on the burgeoning transformative service research paradigm (Ostrom et al., 2010; Rosenbaum et al., 2011). Doing so requires that educators discuss how service exchanges may promote or create transformational changes and improvements in the well-being of those involved in these exchanges, including consumers, employees, families, social networks, and society.

In the following section, we turn our attention to exploring the impact of a multicultural service sensitivity exercise on students who were enrolled in two separate undergraduate services marketing courses. One course was held during the fall semester, and the other was held during the spring semester. This study employs methodological triangulation to explore the effects of a multicultural exercise on students’ lives from two perspectives. The first study inductively evaluates the immediate impact of the exercise on students from a qualitative, humanistic perspective by drawing on Glaser’s (1996) gerund grounded theory. The second study empirically explores the longer term impact of the exercise on students’ views of diversity by employing the Miville–Guzman Universality Diversity Scale–Short Form (M-GUDS-S; Miville et al., 1999).

Study 1

Sample

We obtained data through online, self-administered questionnaires given to a class of 45 undergraduate students (27 females, 28 males) who were enrolled in a services marketing course at a large Midwestern university. We created an online questionnaire and provided students with access to the questionnaire for 48 hours after they completed the serviced quality exercise. Of the 45 students, 41 (91%) voluntarily participated in the study by providing open responses to the following question: “Can you describe how the exercise changed your views toward the customer experience in service settings?”

Analysis

We analyzed the qualitative responses by using gerund grounded theory (Glaser, 1996). Glaser (1996, 2002) conceived this inductive coding technique as being applicable to contexts in which people undergo a process of change, which he termed as a basic social process (BSP). Furthermore, Glaser urged grounded theorists to associate emergent BSPs with active verbs that are indicative of a change process, thus referring to studies that reveal BSPs as gerund grounded theories. Following the essential coding tenets of grounded theory (Glaser, 1996), which calls for line-by-line coding of each informant’s response to the question and paying especially close attention to the 12 most common words and phrases in the data (Table 2), we show that the data support a BSP of “realizing service discrimination,” as Figure 2 shows.

Table 2.

Analysis of 12 Most Important Words and Phrases.

Words/phrases	Percentage of responses containing words/phrases	Number of responses containing words/phrases
Realize	30	12
Customer	22	9
Service	22	9
Exercise	20	8
Situations	17	7
Not think	17	7
Eyes	10	4
Aware	7	3
Training	5	2
Manager	5	2
Stereotyping	5	2
Surprised	5	2

Figure 2.

Basic social process: Realizing discrimination.

More specifically, the BSP illustrates that by completing the multicultural service sensitivity exercise, students engage in a learning process in which they realize the full extent to which service discrimination exists in the marketplace (Rosenbaum et al., 2012). In this learning process, we propose that students move along a continuum from a lack of or limited realization of marketplace discrimination to full realization of the extent to which customers may experience marketplace discrimination. In some instances, students may already fully comprehend service discrimination before participating in the activity. In these rare cases, students tend to remain entrenched in this stage after completing the exercise because the exercise buttresses their perspectives of service discrimination. In the following section, we reveal how students realize service discrimination, noting how the exercise helped them move from an initial stage to full realization.

Lack of realization

Some informants reported that this exercise “opened their eyes” to discrimination and that they had previously lacked any realization, or “did not think,” that marginalized and ethnic consumers experience marketplace discrimination. For example, a respondent said, “I think that this exercise just really brought me to look at racism and discrimination in a new light. The discussion among my peers was the most eye-opening in class.” Another informant lacked any realization of the issue and had undergone a transformation:

I didn’t realize how many stereotypes there actually are while shopping in retail settings. I work in retail, so if I ever find myself or someone else discriminating I will definitely stand up or know how to handle it better.

Evidence of multicultural sensitivity enhancement that occurs in students after this exercise is reflected in the way informants describe the event. Notably, many students used the term “eye-opening” in their description of this learning exercise. For example, one student noted, “It opened my eyes to people in customer service settings and was a way to reflect how I am at customer service and if I discriminate.” Another said, “It made me open my eyes to a variety of different situations that may occur.”

Some realization

Other students revealed that they had some realization of marketplace discrimination through personal experience or because of their work situations. However, this exercise helped them moved along a continuum to full realization. For example, one minority male student noted that this activity helped him realize that other consumers also experience discriminatory actions: “As a minority who has experienced customer experience discrimination I was surprised and glad to have a professor speak about the topic. After the exercise I realized that many customers deal with discrimination.” Another informant, who was sensitized to retail discrimination given her experience, expanded her frame of reference after the exercise:

I have worked in customer service since I was 16, so I feel that I already had pretty realistic views. I am guilty of treating certain people differently on a bad day just like anyone. I think the lecture made me look at things a bit more sensitively than before.

Full realization

The results also reveal that some informants fully realized the extent to which consumers experience marketplace discrimination before engaging in the exercise, typically from their extensively noted retail experience. However, the informants still remarked that the exercise had been worthwhile. One informant said, “I did not change my views toward the customer experience. I know that customers are often treated badly by others. However, I still think it [the exercise] was beneficial.” Another informant also noted his full realization of the topic but agreed that the exercise was still beneficial in helping verbalize his thoughts: “I felt that way for a long time and never express this so clearly in words.”

Overall, the data reveal that students experience a key “ah-hah” learning experience from participating in the exercise, which encourages them to engage in an internal change process related to diversity/multicultural awareness (Larke & Larke, 2009). Although some students and services marketing educators may consider some of the exercise examples disturbing and uncomfortable, the data reveal that this exercise represents a powerful tool for helping future managers better understand both the contemporary marketplace and the situations they might confront in their future roles as managers in service settings. Indeed, evidence of the social process that students undergo from partaking in this exercise, as well as its potential positive impact on a business student’s future career, is evident in these excerpts. One student remarked,

The exercise made me realize there are some really tough issues in services that need to be addressed and it takes an excellent manager to make the changes happen. They won’t happen unless frontline employees are thoroughly trained.

Another student explained how this exercise exposed him to a new reality:

I feel like I am an open person to all different types of situations, but being that I’m from a small town, these are some things I never even think about because I’ve never been faced with those situations. It [the exercise] helped me realize that discrimination and racism are still very present all over the place and that I need stop it as a manager.

In the following section, we turn attention to empirically exploring the impact of the exercise on students’ awareness and acceptance of both the similarities and the differences among people.

Study 2

Sample

The sample for this study consisted of 76 undergraduate students (40 female, 36 male) who were enrolled in a services marketing course at a large Midwestern university; participation in the study was voluntary. None of these students participated in Study 1. The participants were asked to complete a written version of the M-GUDS-S in class at two time points during the semester: 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after they participated in the service quality exercise. To maintain anonymity, the participants provided the last four digits or their cell phones as an identification marker. In addition, they needed to be in attendance at all three time points to participate in the study.

Instrument

We employed the M-GUDS-S (Fuertes, Milville, Mohr, Sedlacek, & Gretchen, 2000; Miville et al., 1999) to evaluate the effect of student participation in the multicultural service sensitivity exercise on their orientation toward a “universal-diverse orientation” (UDO). This type of orientation refers to an awareness and acceptance of both the similarities and the differences that exist among people (Miville, Carlozzi, Gushue, Schara, & Ueda, 2006; Miville et al., 1999). The M-GUDS-S consists of 15 Likert-type items, which are measured on a continuum from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). We chose to use the M-GUDS-S because researchers have concluded that UDO is a critical aspect of multicultural competence and particularly relevant in examining people’s ability to empathize with culturally different people. In addition, a variety of studies, primarily in the psychology and counseling domains (Pastor, 2009), have used both the long- and short-form M-GUDS extensively.

The M-GUD-S treats UDO as consisting of three subscales. The first subscale, Diversity of Contact, reflects a person’s interest in participating in diverse, internationally focused social and cultural activities. The second subscale, Relativistic Appreciation, reflects a person’s appreciation of both similarities and differences in people and the impact of these similarities and differences on his or her self-understanding and personal growth. The third subscale, Comfort With Differences, evaluates a person’s degree of comfort with diverse individuals (for extensive methodological and theoretical discussion, see Fuertes et al., 2000). We evaluated scale reliabilities by analyzing Cronbach’s alpha for each subscale, at both time points, and item-to-item correlations. All the coefficient alpha results were greater than .70, indicating satisfactory reliability (Nunnally, 1978). All M-GUDS-S items, means, standard deviations, and Cronbach’s alphas appear in Table 3.

Table 3.

M-GUDS-S Items and Scale Statistics.

Diversity of Contact

I would like to join an organization that emphasizes getting to know people from diverse social and cultural activities.

I would like to go to dances that feature music from other countries.

I often listen to music from other cultures.

I am interested in learning about the many cultures that have existed in this world.

I attend events where I might get to know people from different racial backgrounds.

Prestimuli: Cronbach’s α = .80; M = 18.54, SD = 4.99

Poststimuli: Cronbach’s α = .86; M = 18.88, SD = 5.20

Relativistic Appreciation

Persons with disabilities can teach me things I could not learn elsewhere.

I can best understand someone after I get to know how he/she is both similar and different from me.

Knowing how a person differs from me greatly enhances our friendship.

In getting to know someone, I like knowing both how he/she differs from me and is similar to me.

Knowing about the different experiences of other people helps me understand my own problems better.

Prestimuli: Cronbach’s α = .73; M = 22.54, SD = 3.53

Poststimuli: Cronbach’s α = .74; M = 25.25, SD = 3.18

Comfort With Differences (all items are reverse scored)

Getting to know someone of another race is generally an uncomfortable experience for me.

I am only at ease with people of my race.

It’s really hard for me to feel close to a person of another race.

It is very important that a friend agrees with me on most issues.

I often feel irritated with persons of a different race.

Prestimuli: Cronbach’s α = .80; M = 23.82, SD = 4.28

Poststimuli: Cronbach’s α = .81; M = 23.14, SD = 4.81

Source. Fuertes, Milville, Mohr, Sedlacek, and Gretchen (2000).

Note. M-GUDS-S = Miville–Guzman Universality Diversity Scale–Short Form.

Research Hypotheses

Given that the descriptive data reveal that students become more multiculturally sensitive after engaging in the service quality exercise, we speculate that their UDO changes primarily in terms of students having a more relativistic appreciation for minority, ethnic, and stigmatized consumers after they complete the exercise. Thus, we put forth the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: After completing the proposed multicultural service sensitivity exercise, students should report higher levels of relativistic appreciation than before they completed the exercise.

It is worth noting here that the sensitivity exercise is designed to enhance a student’s relativistic appreciation for others; thus, we do not expect to see changes in the other M-GUDS-S scales, diversity of contact and comfort with differences, after students complete the exercise.

More specifically, the purpose of the sensitivity exercise is to help students recognize discrimination in consumption settings, rather than to help them realize that they can acquire managerial skills by participating in social and cultural campus activities that emphasize an appreciation for diversity. Hence, a student’s reported diversity of contact score should not change as a result of completing the exercise.

Similarly, we do not expect a student’s comfort with personally engaging with people who share diverse and multicultural background to change as a result of the sensitivity exercise. The reason being is that the exercise sensitizes students to discriminatory situations that consumers often confront in consumption settings rather than engaging in role-play situations in which students would have to sell products to minority or stigmatized customers. In other words, a role-play exercise would most likely sensitize students to personally engaging with diverse customers; however, this is not the intent of the proposed exercise. Therefore, we will test mean changes in the diversity of contact and comfort with differences scales in an exploratory manner—that is, without having any a priori expectations for changes in the scale means between the two time periods.

Method

We conducted three paired-samples t tests on each of the subscales to evaluate whether student participation in the multicultural service quality exercise influenced participants’ UDO. The means at each time point and the differences between the means are shown in Table 4.

Table 4.

Mean Differences and Standard Deviations of M-GUDS-S Scores.

M-GUDS-S subscale	Preexercise M (SD)	Postexercise M (SD)	Mean difference
Diversity of Contact	3.71 (1.00)	3.78 (1.04)	0.07
Relativistic Appreciation	4.51 (0.70)	5.01 (0.64)	0.50***
Comfort With Differences	4.76 (0.86)	4.67 (0.96)	.09

Note. M-GUDS-S = Miville–Guzman Universality Diversity Scale–Short Form.

***

p < .000.

Results

Relativistic appreciation

A paired-samples t test on the subscale, Relativistic Appreciation, resulted in a significant difference between the pre- and postexercise measures. Thus, Hypothesis 1 is supported. The data results indicate that the mean for participants’ relativistic appreciation significantly increased from “agreeing a little bit” to valuing the impact of diversity on their self-understanding, M = 4.50, to fully “agreeing,” M = 5.05, t(75) = 7.50, p < .000, 2 weeks after they participated in the exercise. That is, the multicultural service quality exercise seems to enhance the extent to which students value the influence of diversity on their self-understanding and personal growth, which is the primary purpose of the sensitivity exercise.

Other scales

For the subscale, the Diversity of Contact, the paired-samples t test reveals no significant differences between measures before (M = 3.71) and after (M = 3.78) the exercise. Likewise, the mean differences for the Comfort With Differences were not significantly different (M _pre = 4.76, M _post = 4.67). As we previously discussed, these nonsignificant mean changes were expected.

Overall, by participating in the multicultural service sensitivity exercise, students report a higher level of relativistic appreciation for recognizing and valuing the similarities and differences among diverse people, which is a necessary component in their ability as future managers to understand people from different backgrounds. However, the results also reveal that student participation in the exercise does not affect their interests in participating in diverse social and cultural activities or the degree to which they personally feel comfortable with diverse people. Rather, the in-class exercise seems to help services marketing students empathize with culturally different people, especially by realizing that marketplace discrimination is thriving in the 21st century.

Conclusion

Business educators have attempted to meet the AACSB’s (2010) commitment to the concept of diversity in people and ideas by integrating globalization into their international business and marketing courses or by emphasizing the value of hiring a diverse workforce and supporting corporate diversity in their human resource courses (Bell et al., 2009; Gay, 2002; Stern, 2008). Although these accomplishments are notable, a void still exists in services marketing courses in terms of sensitizing students to the discriminatory behaviors that consumers often confront from employees and customers in service settings.

To date, service researchers have explored the extent to which consumers belonging to minority, ethnic, marginalized, and subcultural groups commonly experience discrimination in retail settings from service employees and other customers; however, this topic is relatively absent from key services marketing and retailing textbooks (Berman & Evans, 2010; Diamond & Litt, 2009; Zeithaml et al., 2013) and, thus, from classroom discussions. Consequently, students entering careers as service/retail managers often understandably fail to fully recognize the extent to which service quality is not being equally afforded to all customers and the roles they must play in acting as promoters of customer equality within consumption settings.

This article addresses this void not only in services marketing but also in retailing, hospitality, and fashion courses by offering educators an easy-to-implement, multicultural service sensitivity exercise that shows students how consumers may fail to obtain quality service in the marketplace because of their individual, group, or cultural differences. In addition, we demonstrate the significance of this exercise on students’ multicultural outlook from two methodological perspectives. First, by employing gerund grounded theory (Glaser, 1996), we develop a BSP that shows how participation in the multicultural service sensitivity exercise enables students to move along a continuum that helps them realize the full extent of contemporary service discrimination. Second, we empirically demonstrate that student participation in the exercise influences their UDO (Miville et al., 1999; Miville et al., 2006); more specifically, the exercise significantly improves students’ ability to value the impact of diversity on their self-understanding and personal growth.

If service managers are to possess relativistic appreciation for diversity, the potential impact of the exercise on students’ success in business settings, especially within retail settings, may be profound. Therefore, we intend to take a proactive approach to disseminate this information to leading service research, retailing, and fashion marketing textbook authors and to faculty who are members of the American Marketing Association’s Services Marketing Special Interest Group and the American Collegiate Retail Association.

Furthermore, it might be that students are exhibiting only a temporal improvement in their relativistic appreciation for diversity, which is essentially a remnant of their participating in a pretest screening and a thought-provoking, one-time in-class exercise. Thus, service researchers should consider engaging in a longitudinal study that explores how students who participate in the service sensitivity exercise perform throughout their careers and to discover whether they apply sensitivity training in actual real-life service encounters.

The results of this study may be limited in the sense that all the student samples comprised undergraduate students enrolled in a services marketing course. Although the findings may differ among MBA and executive-level students, we believe that the multicultural service sensitivity exercise provides all students with the ability to work through real-life marketplace situations and enables them to confront the anxiety and discomfort that may arise from working with customers who are significantly different from them. We encourage researchers in the future to explore how this study’s findings share similarities and differences among MBA and executive-level students. Perhaps older students with practical service-related experience undergo internal changes that differ from younger and inexperienced students. In addition, it might be that students’ relativistic appreciation for diversity becomes solidified over time, thus nullifying the impact of the service sensitivity exercise on their personal growth and development.

Most important, the empirical findings suggest that the exercise helps students not only develop a genuine empathy for customers with diverse backgrounds but also realize the bona fide reality that service quality is not a universal custom provided to all customers by employees and other customers in service settings. Thus, by providing multicultural, sensitivity training in their classes, service educators have the potential to transform students’ future careers by preparing them to administer service quality to all customers equally.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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