The effects of customer socialization on customer behavior in social enterprises: role of organizational legitimacy in the eyes of customers

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how customer socialization strategies can help social enterprises (SEs) to establish different types of organizational legitimacy and how different types of organizational legitimacy in turn can encourage customers' positive in-role behavior (such as repurchasing) and extra-role citizenship behavior (such as referral, feedback and forgiveness of quality problems).Design/methodology/approachA survey of 381 customers in Chinese SEs is used to examine the research questions. The paper uses structural equation modeling and bootstrap method to analyze the hypothesized relationships among customer socialization strategies, organizational legitimacy and customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors.FindingsThis study finds that various customer socialization strategies can differentially enhance different types of organizational legitimacy of a SE, which in turn positively affects customers' in-role repeated purchase behavior and extra-role citizenship behavior. The study also finds that three types of organizational legitimacy are highly accumulative; gaining relational and market legitimacy might be a precondition for obtaining social legitimacy for SEs.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first to empirically investigate the important role of customer socialization strategies in the acquisition of different types of organizational legitimacy in the context of SEs. It also shows how different types of organizational legitimacy, in turn, can positively affect customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors. In addition, this is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the accumulative nature of three types of organizational legitimacy in SEs: relational legitimacy, market legitimacy and social legitimacy.