Systematic review on customer citizenship behavior: Clarifying the domain and future research agenda

Maciej Mitrega,Vojtěch Klézl,Vojtěch Spáčil

doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.11.029

Abstract

In the last two decades customer citizenship behavior (CCB) has attracted considerable attention. This systematic review maps what we already know about CCB. The study proposes remedies to the conceptual confusion in extant CCB research and positions it vis-a-vis similar but distinct concepts. The study systematizes existing knowledge about antecedents and consequences of CCB. CCB antecedents are organized into six categories: company resources, business to customer relationship quality, value cocreation, identity fit, customer to customer quality, and customer resources, while the CCB outcomes are organized into three categories: customer-company relational outcomes, customer-related outcomes and employeerelated outcomes. The study also offers an extensive CCB’s further research directions that are grouped along Theory, Methodology and Context.

Highlights

The idea of customers as the “good soldiers” of a company and the concept of customer citizenship behavior (CCB) has been studied for more than a decade since it was introduced by Groth (2005). Groth (2005, p. 11) built the foundations for the domain by proposing CCB in the context of service industries as voluntary and discretionary behav iors that are not required for the successful production and/or delivery of the service but that, on the whole, help the service organization overall
Corresponding with the procedure of a two-step inductivedeductive coding of antecedents, as proposed by Sandberg & AarikkaStenroos (2014), we propose a typology of CCB antecedents that is inspired by value co-creation (VCC)/ S-D logic
We make important step forward in this endeavor as we propose extensive classification of CCB antecedents and consequences based on key VCC concepts such as company resources and customer resources

Summary

Introduction

The idea of customers as the “good soldiers” of a company and the concept of customer citizenship behavior (CCB) has been studied for more than a decade since it was introduced by Groth (2005). Groth (2005, p. 11) built the foundations for the domain by proposing CCB in the context of service industries as voluntary and discretionary behav iors that are not required for the successful production and/or delivery of the service but that, on the whole, help the service organization overall. The concept proposed by Groth (2005) was broad covering such diverse behavior as; brand recommendations, helping other customers and providing feedback, further empirical studies have added new CCB components sometimes quite far from the original CCB dimensionality (Bove et al 2009; Nguyen et al 2014) While such reconsiderations may be needed considering dynamics of socio-economic trends, especially customer behavior trends (Ajiboye et al, 2019; Davenport et al, 2020; Rust, 2020), there is always a need to discuss new propositions with regard to conceptual boundaries of the concept to assure its uniqueness. To advance understanding of how CCB emerges and what it leads to, there is a need to critically discuss the domain of the concept by looking retrospectively at its origins and with consideration of further theoret ical and empirical developments

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion