The impact of perceived service fairness on customer citizenship behaviors: The mediating role of relationship marketing

Abstract

This research contributes to building a comprehensive understanding on how customer evaluations regarding different facets of service fairness affect bank-consumer relationship building process and lead customers to perform various citizenship behaviors by examining empirically this relationship at multi-group level. Although banking service is known to encounter numerous service failure episodes there has been scant investigations in commercial banking sector of Pakistan that have addressed the connection among service fairness, relationship marketing and customer engagement. Data was gathered quantitively with the help of questionnaire distributed using stratified random sampling technique. Data was gathered from 1430 consumers of banking services located within scheduled bank branches in a single cross-section. The model was assessed using partial least square based Structured Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), using Smart PLS 3.2.7 statistical software. The results of this research confirmed that banking consumers commonly evaluate fairness in exchange relationships when dealing with service providers. The results show that service fairness evaluations had direct influence on customer citizenship behavior, however this relationship is better explained by a firm's relationship marketing efforts. Keywords: Service fairness, relationship marketing, customer citizenship behaviors, multigroup analysis, banking sector.