Extant literature has a controversy over the effects of customer relationship on customer responses to service failure. Buffering perspective suggests that strong relationship can mitigate customers¡¦ unfavorable reactions to service failure; whereas amplifying perspective finds that these negative customer responses are enhanced by strong relationship. Until now, it still lacks a unified framework to explain the mechanisms under each perspective and to reconcile both perspectives. The motivation of this research is to fill up this research gap and to solve the controversy over the effects of customer relationship under service failures. By integrating interdependence theory and reciprocity theory, this research proposes a framework to analyze when and why each of buffering and amplifying effects would occur and how amplifying effects can shift to buffering effects.
The major conjectures of the framework proposed by this research are that customer relationship has amplifying effects on customers¡¦ immediate responses while it has buffering effects on their prolonged responses; moreover, customers¡¦ immediate and prolonged responses are guided by different reciprocity motivations and the shift from amplifying effects to buffering effects is triggered by motivation transformation that can be enhanced by increasing a number of customers¡¦ social concerns.
This framework is verified through one survey study and two experimental studies. Collectively, the results broadly support that: (a) a customer relationship has amplifying effects on customers¡¦ immediate responses while has buffering effects on their prolonged responses; (b) immediate responses are majorly governed by self-oriented motivations in reciprocation of the firms¡¦ past behavior, whereas to some extent prolonged responses are guided by relationship-oriented motivations in reciprocation of the firms¡¦ anticipated behavior; (c) transformation of reciprocity motivations triggers the shift from amplifying effects into buffering effects; (d) concern about future of relationship with the firm increases the possibility of transformation and thus the occurrence of buffering effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0601110-163435 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Creators | Liu, Yi-Fen |
| Contributors | Cheng-Nan Chen, Jun-ying Huang, Stephen D. Tsai, Jacob Y. H. Jou, Chi-Cheng Wu, Ming-rea Kao, Shuei-Shen Liu |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0601110-163435 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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