16-01-2013, 11:14 AM
Organisational justice and customer citizenship behaviour of retail industries
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ABSTRACT
Previous research has concerned itself more with customers’ purchasing behaviours but
not non-purchasing behaviour. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the
organisational justice (OJ) and customer citizenship behaviour (CCB), including the
mediating role of organisational trust. A survey was conducted on a sample of 447
fast-food restaurant customers in Taiwan in order to test the proposed model. The
findings showed that the customers who have higher perceptions of justice have
higher levels of trust and CCB. Positive relationship was found between trust and
CCB. In addition, trust has a partially significant mediating effect between OJ and
CCB. The findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical
implications, and also provide some suggestions for managerial practice and further
research.
Introduction
Modern customers are better informed than their predecessors and desire to express their
opinions about decision making and the procedures of an enterprise’s services and management
(Jayachandran, Sharma, Kaufman, & Raman, 2005; Verhoef, 2003). This
creates an interaction between companies and customers and also affects customer behaviours
at the same time (Mithas, Krishnan, & Fornell, 2005). Therefore, organisations will
have to care about not only the points of view of employees but also those of customers.
Loyal employees are a company’s favourite, but now enterprises also need to pay more
attention to loyal customers (Kim & Mauborgne, 1997), which is like treating customers
as employees.
Interactions with the enterprises make customers decide their loyalty to, and relationship
with, the company (Rogers, 2005; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995; Sirdeshmukh, Singh, &
Sabol, 2002). If the corporation cannot raise the quality of total customer experiences, then
customers will not stay with it (Seybold, 2001). In order to provide a total customer experience,
enterprises need to have a favourite and an identifiable brand name, develop a trust
system and build an interaction model of customer druthers (Payne & Frow, 2005; Uncles,
Dowling, & Hammond, 2002). Previous research has concerned itself more with customers’
purchasing behaviours (e.g. customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, etc.), but not
non-purchasing behaviour. If we can explore customer behaviour models from the
aspect of organisational behaviour, it should be more interesting and challenging.
Conceptual framework and research hypotheses
Customer citizenship behaviour
Gordon (1999) defines customer relationship management as a repeating and continuously
improving process. He believes that enterprises aggressively understand customers’
demands in order to provide the products and services they need. This is from a customer-
oriented management aspect and its framework is based on developing loyal customers.
These customers could get satisfactory products and services from the same
business and they do not need to compare this business with another to search for better
products because it is time-consuming and they may not find a better solution (Dwyer,
Schurr, & Sejo, 1987; Gummesson, 1987). Another reason is that they trust the
company and they are not just introducing other relatives and friends to join and
become loyal customers, but also try to protect the company’s reputation (Gro¨nroos,
1990; Schoder & Madeja, 2004). In fact, this kind of behaviour is very close to the performance
of inside employees. Loyal customers know the company’s products, services,
procedures, system culture, strategies, goals and missions. Some of them know more than
employees and are willing to become spokespeople for the products of this company. The
enterprise should care about these customers’ ideas, attitudes and behaviours (Nelson,
2003; Zeithaml & Bitner, 2003).
Mediation effect of OT
Because of the competitive service environment, the services that the retailer offer are of
concern to the customers. They devote time to have a benignancy interaction relationship
with the customers. Many enterprises figure out that the key to continuous consuming behaviour
of customers is the interaction experience and feelings between the organisation
and the customers. Therefore, if the company can earn the friendship and trust of the consumers,
then they will be one step further to creating and maintaining a good relationship
with the customers and forming a customer trust atmosphere and premise (Anderson &
Narus, 1990; Madhok, 1994). At the same time, based on the social exchange relationship,
customers will return to the organisation. Besides, Morgan and Hunt (1994) use the transaction
cost viewpoint to stand for trust and promise as the core successful promotion. The
proposed trust and promise is the key mediation variable in exploring the effects of
cooperation, quitting and conflict.
Methodology
Sample
The sample of this study focuses on the general retail stores or those that accept service
consumers. Questionnaires were used to collect the data for this study. A questionnaire
was submitted as a pre-test to determine possible shortcomings in comprehension and
to confirm its suitability. A pilot test of the survey was conducted with 40 customers
within one of the largest fast-food chain restaurants in the Kaohsiung area, and they
were asked to evaluate their perceptions. Based on the results of the pre-test, some revisions
of items on the questionnaire were made. Questionnaires were administered
between 1 October and 1 December 2006, with the sample being randomly selected
from a certain college in Kaohsiung. Students from all areas of Taiwan responded to
the questionnaire by their own actual consuming experience within the largest fast-food
chain restaurants. We also selected commercial workers in order to include two kinds
of consumers’ representative samples (Petrick, 2002). The questionnaire was a self-administered
survey and respondents filled it by themselves. Totally, 447 valid surveys were
obtained. What follows are variable measurements and operational definitions. All
measures used for the constructs in the model are shown in Table 1 and Appendix. Participants
were asked to respond on a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’
(1) to ‘strongly agree’ (5). In addition, one item in conscientiousness and one item
in courtesy were reverse scored. After reversing such scale responses, high scores indicated
higher conscientiousness and courtesy. Higher scores also indicated higher distributive
justice, procedural justice, interactive justice, OT, altruism and civic virtue.
Measurement model evaluation
We assess the quality and adequacy of our measurement models by investigating
reliability, and performing a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to evaluate construct validity
regarding convergent and discriminate validity. First, reliability is supported by the
fact that all Cronbach’s a values exceed 0.70, indicating acceptable reliability levels
(Nunnally, 1978). Moreover, as can be derived from Table 1, all of the composite
reliability measures are above 0.60, corresponding to Bagozzi and Yi’s (1988)
minimum values of 0.60. As a result, we can conclude that all constructs yield satisfactory
reliabilities. Second, convergent validity is supported by the fact that the overall fit of the
models is good and that all loadings are highly statistically significant (p , 0.01, all
t-values . 2) (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988; Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham,
2006). Third, from Table 2, discriminant validity is supported by the fact that the
square roots of average variance extracted (AVE) are higher than the correlation coefficients
of constructs (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).
Conclusions
According to the purpose of our research, research hypotheses and empirical analysis
results, the conclusions are as follows. First, H1 shows the higher the justice evaluation
of customers to retailers, the easier it is for customers to have trust in retailers. Therefore,
before making decisions on any policy, retailers should consider the standpoint of customers
and be concerned with their thoughts and ideas. When setting up any measures it
needs to fit justice principles. Also, if retailers effectively perform systems with justice,
the centripetal force of customers-to-retail will be strengthened and customers will naturally
increase the degree of trust to retailers.