Stimulating Customer Citizenship Behavior With Service Climate: The Mediating Role of Customer Psychological Empowerment

Hailian Qiu,Ning Wang,Minglong Li

doi:10.1177/21582440211006065

Hailian Qiu, Ning Wang + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211006065

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Abstract

This study expanded the research on service climate to the perspective of customers in the hospitality context and explicated the influence mechanism of service climate on customer citizenship behavior. Service climate traditionally perceived by employees has been well studied, but only limited studies focused on the customer perspective service climate. Based on the existing literature, customer perceived service climate in the hospitality industry was operationalized and its influence on customer citizenship behavior was proposed. After the measurement purification with exploratory factor analysis based on the pilot data using IBM SPSS 20, data collection was conducted in the hotels in Wuhan, China. A total of 432 valid questionnaires were collected and the data were analyzed for hypotheses testing, using Mplus 7.4. The research results indicate that each factor of customer service climate has a positive impact on customer citizenship behavior, with the strength of effects being different. Customer psychological empowerment plays a partial mediating role between some factors of service climate and customer citizenship behavior. The findings provide implications for service enterprises in terms of service climate design and customer citizenship behavior facilitation.

Highlights

With the increasing important role customers play in service industries, managing customers as human resources to stimulate their citizenship behaviors becomes a means by which service organizations gain advantages over others
This study explores the relationship between customer perceived service climate and their citizenship behaviors, and the role of customer psychological empowerment in the relationships
The present study expanded the research on service climate to the perspective of customers in the hospitality context and explicated the influence mechanism of service climate on customer citizenship behavior

Summary

Introduction

With the increasing important role customers play in service industries, managing customers as human resources to stimulate their citizenship behaviors becomes a means by which service organizations gain advantages over others. Customer citizenship behaviors describe customers’ voluntary behaviors that are not indispensable for the success of service processes but beneficial for the service providers (Chiu et al, 2015). These extra-role behaviors can effectively strengthen the relationship between customers and service providers, improve service quality, and support the growth of service enterprises (Van Tonder et al, 2018). Service climate is one of the important factors that provide customers benefits and value (Bowen & Schneider, 2014)

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