Abstract
Customer citizenship behavior in the online shopping environment is vital to the success of e-retailers. However, it is unclear whether and how service recovery expectation and recovery justice predict customer citizenship behavior in e-retailing settings. Grounded on the expectation confirmation theory and social exchange theory, this study examined the influence of service recovery expectation and recovery justice on customer citizenship behavior with a serial mediation of recovery expectation confirmation and post-recovery satisfaction. A total of 774 samples from e-shoppers with most impressive (N = 401) and most recent (N = 373) service recovery experience were collected to test the hypotheses using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedures. This study reveals that service recovery expectation has a negative impact on recovery expectation confirmation, while recovery justice positively affects recovery expectation confirmation, which is further positively correlated with post-recovery satisfaction and customer citizenship behavior. Moreover, recovery expectation confirmation and post-recovery satisfaction play a serial mediation in the relationship between service recovery expectation and recovery justice, and customer citizenship behavior. Our study contributes to the growing body of customer citizenship behavior literature by offering an alternative perspective (i.e., service recovery) to understand what encourage or impede customer citizenship behavior, and expands service recovery literature by combining service recovery expectation and recovery justice into a framework and revealing the expectation–confirmation mechanism through which they influence post-recovery satisfaction in online shopping setting.
Highlights
With the rapid development of digital technology, online shopping trends in China are expected to grow rapidly (Xu et al, 2020)
Based on the expectation confirmation theory (ECT) and social exchange theory (SET), this study considers that consumers first make predictions about the specific service recovery measure that may be taken in the future in the case of service failure
The findings showed that the impact of recovery justice on customer citizenship behavior mediated by recovery expectation confirmation and post-recovery satisfaction was significant (β = 0.200) as the confidential interval (CI) does not contain a value of 0 [lower-level CI = 0.131; upper-level CI = 0.307]
Summary
With the rapid development of digital technology, online shopping trends in China are expected to grow rapidly (Xu et al, 2020). Because e-retailers who face too Service Recovery and Customer Citizenship Behavior many imitators and competitors in mature homogenous markets are inclined to rely more on the help and recommendations of e-shoppers (Yi and Kim, 2017; Burnham et al, 2020). Compared with off-line retailing, more service failures may occur in the service delivery process. It is difficult for e-retailers to detect service failures in the online shopping environment (Harris et al, 2006). Once service failure occurs and cannot be effectively recovered, the negative word of mouth will be spread like a virus, which will bring huge losses to e-retailers. Encouraging customer citizenship behavior from online service recovery is an important issue that requires urgent attention
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
