Tài liệu Toward enhancing customer citizenship behaviors in service sector

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY PHAN BICH PHUONG TOWARD ENHANCING CUSTOMER CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR IN SERVICE INDUSTRY MASTER’S THESIS BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Hanoi, 2020 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY PHAN BICH PHUONG TOWARD ENHANCING CUSTOMER CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR IN SERVICE INDUSTRY MAJOR: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION CODE: 8340101.1 RESEARCH SUPERVISORS: Professor. TOHRU INOUE Dr. TRAN THI BICH HANH Hanoi, 2020 CONTENT CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 1.1 Research motivation ................................................................................... 1 1.2 Research objective ...................................................................................... 4 1.3 Research question ....................................................................................... 4 1.4 Research scope ........................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REIVEW .................................................................. 6 2.1 Customer citizenship behavior .................................................................... 6 2.1.1 Conceptual definition ........................................................................... 6 2.1.2 Dimensions of customer citizenship behavior and related research ...... 6 2.1.3 The research investigating the antecedents of customer citizenship behavior ............................................................................................................ 8 2.2 Servicescape ............................................................................................. 11 2.2.1 affect S-O-R theory and influence of servicescape on customer’s positive 11 2.2.2 Physical servicescape and customer positive affect ............................ 12 2.2.3 Social servicescape and customer positive affect ............................... 14 2.2.4 Positive Affect and Customer citizenship behavior ............................ 16 2.3 Role theory and customer’s role readiness ................................................ 17 2.3.1 The physical servicescape and customer role’s readiness ................... 18 2.3.2 Employee’s characteristic and customer ‘s role readiness .................. 19 2.3.3 Customer to customer know-how exchange and customer’ role readiness ......................................................................................................... 20 2.3.4 2.4 Customer’s role readiness and customer citizenship behavior ............ 20 Conceptual model ..................................................................................... 21 CHAPTER 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .................................................... 22 3.1 Sampling .................................................................................................. 22 3.2 Data collection process ............................................................................. 22 3.3 Questionnaire design ................................................................................ 23 3.3.1 Demographic information .................................................................. 23 3.3.2 Questionnaire ..................................................................................... 23 I 3.4 Measurement scale ................................................................................... 24 3.5 Data analysis procedure ............................................................................ 29 3.5.1 Testing reliability – Validity of scale measurement ............................ 29 3.5.2 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) .................................................... 29 3.5.3 Regression analysis ............................................................................ 30 CHAPTER 4. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULT ................................................ 32 4.1 Data description ....................................................................................... 32 4.2 Reliability analysis ................................................................................... 35 4.3 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) .......................................................... 37 4.3.1 EFA for servicescape variables .......................................................... 37 4.3.2 EFA for positive affect variables ........................................................ 39 4.3.3 EFA for role readiness variables ........................................................ 40 4.3.4 EFA for customer citizenship behavior scale ..................................... 41 4.4 Regression Analysis ................................................................................. 42 4.4.1 Correlation analysis ........................................................................... 42 CHAPTER 5. RESULT AND DISCUSSION ........................................................ 46 5.1 Result discussion ...................................................................................... 46 5.1 Theoretical contribution ........................................................................... 49 5.2 Managerial implication ............................................................................. 51 5.3 Limitation and future research .................................................................. 53 II LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2-1. SOR model .......................................................................................... 11 Figure 2-2. Theoretical model................................................................................ 21 III LIST OF TABLES Table 3-1 Measurement scale development of physical servicescape ..................... 26 Table 3-2 Measurement scale development of social servicescape ......................... 27 Table 3-3 Measurement scale development of customer internal response ............. 27 Table 3-4 Measurement scale development of customer citizenship behavior ........ 28 Table 3-5 Likert scale ............................................................................................ 28 Table 4-1 Frequency statistic of demographic information .................................... 32 Table 4-2 Descriptive statistic ............................................................................... 34 Table 4-3. Cronbach’s Alpha value........................................................................ 36 Table 4-4 Exploratory factor analysis result of independent variables .................... 37 Table 4-5 Rotated components .............................................................................. 38 Table 4-6 Exploratory factor analysis of positive affect ........................................ 39 Table 4-7 Rotated component of positive affect scale ............................................ 39 Table 4-8 Exploratory factor analysis of role readiness .......................................... 40 Table 4-9 Rotated component of role readiness ..................................................... 40 Table 4-10 Exploratory factor analysis of customer citizenship behavior .............. 41 Table 4-11 Rotated components of customer citizenship behavior scale ................ 41 Table 4-12 Correlation analysis ............................................................................. 42 Table 4-13 Multi collinearity coefficient diagnostic (VIF) .................................... 42 Table 4-14 Regression analysis.............................................................................. 43 IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Conducting the dissertation study clearly consumed huge amount of time and effort and it would not be completed without the enthusiastic support and encouragement of individuals and organizations. Firstly, I sincerely thank Vietnam Japan University, Yokohama National University, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Vietnam and Japan government for creating favorable conditions for us to gain academic knowledge in Vietnam Japan University and Yokohama National University. I would like to say thanks to Prof. Inoue and Dr. Tran Thi Bich Hanh who not only gave us the directions in the academic research but also help us to have many memorable moments in life. Besides, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to VNU, YNU support from Ms. Huong, Dr. Hino, Dr. Lien Ms. Sakakibara, Ms. Mizuno, Ms. Maeda as well as kind and warm friends in YNU who did help us and guide us during the MBA course. I also send my sincere thanks to all the people who help me to complete the survey during the research process. Last but not least, I would like to thank my team members of VJU - MBA 03 who always besides me and shared feelings and gave me precious life moments during the studying time in VJU In short, I really thank to all people related who spend time helping me to finish this dissertation V ABSTRACT The customer citizenship behavior is a quite new topic for both theoritical research and emperical research. It is undeniable that, along with the development of service industry, it is more and more difficult for firm to enhance their competitive advantage. In this fast moving society, customer is considered as the important source for company not only because of the benefit coming from their frequence of consumption but also from their contribution to organization as helping firm improve the service, increase firm’s reputation by their word of mouth, engage more new customers to use firm’s service by their recommendation, or by other their voluntary behaviors to help other customer discreationally. To help firm to sustain their competitive advantage by enhancing customer citizenship behavior, the research explores which factors in servicescape have influence on customer citizenship behavior, and how this process is formed. The research established theoretical model and empirical investigation under the foundation of SOR theory and Role theory to predict whether the servicescape pose influences on customer citizenship behavior or not. The quantitative research used non-probability sampling and selfadministered questionnaire which adopted from previous relevant research toward 249 people in Vietnam. After processing data by SPSS version 20th , the result shows that the servicescape including physical and social servicescape has positive impact on customer citizenship behavior through both positive affect and role readiness. It is interesting that the employee’s characteristic has the biggest influence on both customer’s positive affect and role readiness which in turn influence citizenship behavior of customer. The elements of physical servicescape the first time, shows the important role in the process of VI forming customer citizenship behavior. The customer - customer knowhow exchange has shown the remarkable impact on customer role readiness in comparison of customer’s positive affect. This research help manager to extent the knowledge and suggest some managerial practice for in service firm in terms of enhancing customer citizenship behavior in service industry. VII CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Research motivation Globalization entails profound changes in every facet of doing business of many firms in service industry (Yi & Gong, 2008). There are many business opportunities opening for service firms to improve their business as well as profit. At the same time, many challenges have been raised in competition for service firm especially maintaining and enhancing competitive advantage in market. In order to against those difficulties and find the directions to improve firm’s competitiveness service companies has transferred to concentrate on the role of consumer as a covalue creator. In service context, customer ‘s role is considered as “partial employees” (Bowen & Schneider, 1985), role of customer could be classified in two mains types as in-role and extra role behavior (Bettencourt & Stephen, 1997). In-role behaviors is expressed through the participation of customer as arriving on time for appointment, provide necessary information for service facilitation, meanwhile, extra role consist of behaviors which takes customer’s time, effort, physical welfare, material possessions (Staub, 1978). And citizenship behavior is a type of customer’s extra role behavior which possibly poses the positive impact on service’s employee’s performance, service’s providers as well as other stakeholders not only inside but outside the service context. Both in-role and extra role behaviors as customer participation and customer citizenship behaviors creates value for firm and become potential sources of competitive advantage (Paine & Organ, 2000). In fact, the nature of two behavior roles is not similar to each other. The in-role behavior is performed when the customer shows their co-operation because of their outcome expectation. Meanwhile the customer citizenship behavior’s nature emphasizes the voluntary and discretional action beyond their own responsibility in purchasing and consuming service which might helpful for organization. In this recognition, there are remarkable amount of research in line of customer citizenship behavior as providing supportive 1 directions for service organization in enhancing their competitiveness. Bettencourt (1997) proposed that help firms to improve the service quality, assist the other customers to complete their service, or help employees to improve the service delivery are the main types of customer citizenship behavior. Those mentioned aspects of customer citizenship behavior support firm to achieve effective performance (van Doorn, et al., 2010). In other word, customer citizenship behavior is considered as a type of value creation behavior toward firm (Gong, et al., 2016; Yi & Gong, 2013). Although, there are many empirical and theoretical research in terms of customer citizenship topic (Bettencourt, 1997; Yi & Gong, 2008a; Bove, et al., 2009; Anaza, 2014), the number of paper in this topic is limited within around 20 years. Servicescape significantly influences toward customer behavior response through eliciting the customer’s emotion (Bitner, 1992). But only few studies have investigated how the servicescape influence on customer behavior. Jung & Yoo (2017) argued that the social interaction happens in the servicescape impacts customer’s emotion, positive customer – customer interaction, dysfunctional customer behavior has influences on customer citizenship behavior through customer’s affection toward service. However, those investigated factors only reflect the social side of servicescape. Moreover, Daunt & Harris (2012) pointed out that both physical servicescape as well as social servicescape has influence on the disaffection of customer and resulting in the dysfunctional behavior. Even so, the number of research investigates the relationship between servicescape and customer citizenship behavior is clearly unremarkable. On the one hand, for 20 years since how customer citizenship behavior occurred has been taken into investigation. It is not so new that the psychological process as customer’s affection, customer satisfaction are the important factors to engage customer into citizenship behavior. Bettencourt (1997) argued that customer tends to engage in voluntary to benefit firms when they satisfied with the service provided. Furthermore, Yi & Gong (2008) basing on affective theory of social exchange 2 explained how positive affect tightly related to customer citizenship behavior. It could be concluded that, the most previous research applied on social exchange theory as the theoretical foundation to explain the psychological process forming customer citizenship behavior. Except for social exchange theory, the other theoretical foundation applied to construct the model and explore new factor appeared rarely in marketing and service research. Widely applied in servicescape research - SOR theory has support significantly in explanation of how customer emotions have been raised then cause their approach or avoidance behavior in service context. On this basis, my research plan to explore how the servicescape possibly influences customer citizenship behavior under the SOR theory approach. At the same times, the current study also approaches to explore this relationship between servicescape and customer citizenship behavior basing on the role theory to explore the influence process of physical environment on customer’s role readiness and then engage customer into customer citizenship behavior. In line of role theory, customers who do not have confidence for service provider, service provider or other customers will likely less engage into behavior as help the other customer or help firm to improve the service or assist employee in service delivery. Previous reseach has pointed out that, customer in general shows citizenship behavior when they have affection toward organization, but ignoring the customer’s psychology whether customer feel ready for a voluntary behavior or not. Customer ingeneral engages in citizenship behavior when they feel confident about their competence, knowledge and skills about things relating to the service they have been used. In short, the research pioneeringly investigates the impact of servicescape on customer citizenship behavior in two different directions. The first approach via SOR theory to understand how servicescape stimuli customer citizenship behavior through the positive affect. The second approach via Role theory and take the role readiness 3 into the theoretical model to explore the impact of servicescape on customer citizenship behaviors. 1.2 Research objective To explore which factors of servicescape influence positive affect and role readiness to examine whether positive affect and role readiness influence customer citizenship behavior and imply suggestion for firm with the purpose of enhancing customer citizenship behavior. 1.3 Research question How do servicescape factors influence customer positive affect which in turn influence customer citizenship behavior. How do servicescape factors influence customer role readiness which in turn influence customer citizenship behavior. 1.4 Research scope The research conducted in service industry of Hanoi city and some other big cities as Đà Nẵng, Hồ Chí Minh where there are large amount of population as well as the diversification in terms of service type during the period from 2019- Oct to 2020 Apr. The structure of research  Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter brief the information relating to reseach such as the research motivation, research objective, research question and research scope.  Chapter 2: Literatute review This chapter summarizes relevant theoretical and emperical research to define the theoretical gap. By doing that, the reseacher designs the theoretical framework including the conceptual definition of relevant factors in the 4 construct, the hypothesis development and the explaination which support for hypothesis.  Chapter 3: Research Methodology This chapter represents the research design, applied method and process of data collection  Chapter 4: Result and finding This chapter illustrates the interpretaion the data collected and processed then verify the hypothesis in chapter 2  Chapter 5: Implication and limitation The chapter is to answer the research questions, shows the theoretical contribution, practical implication and further research’s direction. 5 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REIVEW 2.1 Customer citizenship behavior 2.1.1 Conceptual definition For around 20 recent years, there is a remarkable number of research about customer citizenship behavior in the marketing research since Ford (1995) and Bettencourt (1997) posited that a productive organization need employees who are willing to perform in many kinds of behaviors beyond their own specific task in the job description. Ford (1995) had found that similar to employees, customers also get involved in types of citizenship behaviors as giving the feedback to the employee, giving recommendation about the a place to friends or families. Bettencourt (1997) also supposed that the customer citizenship behaviors includes the voluntary and discretionary behaviors that partly helpful for firm to deliver the service such as sharing their positive experience with other customers about the service they have used or expressed the good attitude to employees. Then, company can improve the operation performance through the customer’s contribution for the business improvement by their help behavior toward the other customers as sharing the experience with the other customers (Groth, 2005). In short, customer citizenship behavior is a kind of extra role behavior which is performed by customer without the purpose of monetary and beyond their role voluntarily (Bove, et al., 2009). Those helpful and constructive behavior possibly contribute on performance of organization, employees and employees, organization and other customers. 2.1.2 Dimensions of customer citizenship behavior and related research 2.1.2.1 Providing feedback to the organization Bettencourt (1997) initially defined providing feedback toward firm as the main meaningful dimension of customer citizenship behavior, and later popularly studied in the same research topic (Bove, et al., 2009; Di, et al., 2010; Groth, 2005; Guo, et 6 al., 2013; Yi & Gong, 2013). Customer who has ever worked with the service firm can show their voluntary behavior as the providing the information about what they experienced during service delivery, it could be compliment, positive evaluation, complaint toward the customer service department, feedback about the features need improvement in survey conducted by firm. It could be said that those are the important and valuable information sources or signal for service management to find out what they should adjust or what they have not done properly and put effort to improve their service quality (Bettencourt, 1997; Voss, et al., 2004) 2.1.2.2 Helping other customers The customer behavior regarding voluntary help toward the other consumers as explaining the way to use the service effectively, correctly (Anaza, 2014; Yi & Gong, 2008). These help behaviors takes customer’s time, effort to support other customer during the service delivery process (Anaza & Zhao, 2013; Bove, et al., 2009). In short, the behavior toward the other’s behavior to make sure that is a proper behavior could occur is also a concept of customer citizenship behavior – helping other customer 2.1.2.3 Making recommendation Recommendation is given voluntarily and discretionarily by the customer not because of monetary is a main type of customer citizenship behavior (Gremler & Brown, 1999). Making recommendation as positive word- of mouth can support firm to enhance their reputation and competitive advantage (Bettencourt, 1997). The reason is customer before making the buying decisions, they tend to take the reference from other customer besides company’s advertising campaign (Bansal & Voyer, 2000) 2.1.2.4 The other dimensions The relationship affiliation is a kind of citizenship behavior, for example participation in the firm’s activities (Bove, et al., 2009). Or, the behavior discretionarily tell to other customers about the relationship between themselves and firm through indicating visible evidence like their personal belongings is one of 7 citizenship behavior (Gruen, 1995; Bove, et al., 2009). Following this customer citizenship topic, (Keh & Teo, 2001) also suggested that customer tolerance is one of dimensions of citizenship behavior, the extra- role behavior takes customers’ time and effort to be patient in context of service failure. Less mentioned dimensions of customer citizenship behavior include benevolent acts of service facilitation. Bettencourt (1997) demonstrates that the voluntary behavior as respect the quality of service delivery can help firm to create value, because of the facilitation in service delivery process. The customer who exhibit the altruism, the polite, compliance, the consciousness, courtesy is considered as customer citizenship behavior toward organization (Di, et al., 2010). In summary, both theoretical and empirical research have been defined a numerous dimension of customer citizenship behavior. This paper approaches to analyze the influence of certain factors on two main types citizenship behavior of customer. The first approach dimension is through the kind of citizenship behavior benefit directly benefit for firm and the remaining is through the dimension which benefit for other customers as below:  Customer citizenship toward customer include: Help the other customer to complete the service properly  Customer citizenship toward organization include: Help the firm to improve the service quality 2.1.3 The research investigating the antecedents of customer citizenship behavior Many research have proved that the customer’s internal emotions as customer satisfaction, commitment, customer loyalty, trust are the main antecedences of customer citizenship behavior basing on the foundation of social exchange theory. Social exchange theory supposes that customer tend to reciprocate the same behavior benefit back to the organization or individuals who had benefit them (Blau, 1964). Later studies demonstrated that customer satisfaction is a very strong factor in the 8 formation process of customer citizenship behavior. When customer feel satisfied about the service or products they tend to reciprocate toward the service providers, employees who had made benefit for them (Bettencourt, 1997; Groth, 2005; Verleye, et al., 2014; Yi & Gong, 2008). Similarly, customer commitment has been supposed as a determinant of customer citizenship behavior in marketing literature (Bartikowski & Walsh, 2011; Curth, et al., 2014). Another type of customer’s internal emotion response is taken into investigation is loyalty (Bartikowski & Walsh, 2011) and Customer trust (Di, et al., 2010). Besides those factors relating to the internal emotion response of customer which lead to the citizenship behaviors, there are some investigations regarding the influence of employee characteristic as employee appearance, employee behavior, employee emotion. Bove et al. (2009) showed that customer tend to exhibit the voluntary behavior which benefit firm when they recognize employee commitment, credibility, benevolence, and loyalty. Such perception about employee’s citizenship behavior and employee’s dysfunctional behavior are important predictor of customer citizenship behavior (Yi & Gong, 2008). Furthermore, Delpechitre, et al. (2018) has found that customer citizenship behavior can be influenced by perceived employee’s emotions. Additionally, customer characteristics is also an important factor to let the customer citizenship behavior occur (Rosenbaum & Massiah, 2007; Verleye, et al., 2014). The positive interaction with other customer possibly lead to the customer citizenship behavior through customer experience and customer’s affection with service (Jung & Yoo, 2017; Kim & Choi, 2016). Yi, et al. (2013) also indicated in their paper that the citizenship behavior of the fellow customer also relates to the citizenship behavior of customer. The service provider’s characteristic also accounts for a vital part in shaping the customer citizenship behavior. Basing on the flow theory paradigm, Verleye, et al. (2014)’s study demonstrated that organizational support and organizational 9 socialization have impact on customer citizenship behavior toward organization and toward customer through the mediating role of customer role readiness. Bartikowski & Walsh (2011) also mentioned in their empirical research that organizational reputation positively influences on customer citizenship behavior and this relationship is mediated by customer commitment and customer loyalty. In conclusion, the number of investigations about customer citizenship behavior topic has increased year by year, in terms of both theoretical and empirical research. Even so, there is no research conducted to investigate the relationship between servicescape and customer citizenship behavior. In environmental psychology, human behavior is evidently associated with the service environment (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974). In marketing research, numerous conceptual papers and empirical research has proved the importance of the servicescape on customer’s internal emotion response and outcome behavior (Bitner, 1992; Lee, et al., 2008; Daunt & Harris, 2012). The service environment possibly influences customer citizenship behavior through a certain psychological process relating to customer’s internal emotion response. Bitner (1992) supposed that the difference in elements of physical servicescape pose impacts on different status emotion of customer which cause different kind of customer behavior response. However, no research points out physical servicescape ‘s effect on customer citizenship behavior. Furthermore, when it comes to social servicescape, the employees’ characteristic plays an important role as a predictor of customer citizenship behavior, many evidences have proved that employee’s characteristic strongly associated to customer satisfaction an important factor of customer citizenship behavior. Thus, this study also integrates employee’s characteristic as the social facet of servicescape on process generating customer citizenship behavior. Other customer behavior or customer- customer interaction forms are often taken into research as the single element in investigation of its relationship with customer citizenship behavior. The positive interaction as enjoyment or fun are aspects of customer - customer interaction was proved as the predictor of customer citizenship behavior based on social exchange theory. The 10 customer-customer knowhow exchange will be taken into the research to check whether how strong this kind of interaction can influence on customer citizenship behavior. 2.2 Servicescape The service context is conceptualized in different terms. Forexample, it has been mentioned as service environment (Baker, 1987), defined as atmospheric (Kotler, 1973), marketing environment (Turley & Milliman, 2000), and servicescape (Bitner, 1992). This current research used the term servicescape which given by (Bitner, 1992), in mentioning to the design of physical environment and social service environment including service satff characteristic and the interaction with other customers inside the service context which elicit internal reactions from customers leading to the display of approach or avoidance behavior. First, this study will examine the association between servicescape including physical servicescape and social servicescape on positive affect then result in customer citizenship behavior basing on SOR theory. The second approach of the study hightlights the relationship between servicescape and customer citizenship behavior through role readiness on the foundation of role theory. 2.2.1 S-O-R theory and influence of servicescape on customer’s positive affect Figure 2-1. SOR model The figure 2-1 indicates the S-O-R conceptual model which had been developed by Source: Mehrabian and Russel (1974) 11