心理契约违背对饭店顾客忠诚的影响——服务补救策略的调节效应

针对服务企业普遍面对的服务补救低效与顾客忠诚保持的挑战,文章基于心理契约与前瞻性服务补救理论,构建了顾客心理契约违背、服务补救和顾客忠诚间关系的分析框架,实证分析了心理契约违背对顾客忠诚的作用机理,并检验了服务补救策略对这一关系的调节效应。通过对262名饭店顾客的问卷调查,采用回归分析法处理数据,研究结果表明:心理契约违背两个维度与饭店顾客忠诚两个维度均呈显著负相关关系,顾客心理契约违背程度越高,顾客忠诚度越低;服务补救在心理契约违背与饭店顾客忠诚的关系中起到部分调节作用,即当企业服务出现失误而使顾客感知心理契约违背发生时,如果能采用恰当的服务补救策略,可以降低心理契约违背对顾客忠诚的负面影响。

The Impact of Psychological Contract Violation on Hotel Customer Loyalty. Moderating Effect of Service Recovery Strategies

This paper aims to explore the influence of customer psychological contract on customer loyalty, as well as to examine the moderating effects of service recovery strategies. Acquiring and maintaining loyal customers is the fundamental way for an enterprise to gain competitive advantage. However, since the customer psychological contract is complicated and service failure is hard to avoid, maintaining customer loyalty remains a great challenge for service enterprises. The process of completing a deal between customers and a service enterprise is in fact the process of making and fulfilling a contract which is not only economical but also psychological. Psychological contract made up of the expectations which are not expressed by a customer is also an important component of the contract between the two parties. Customer psychological contract violation would occur when the service offering can＇ t keep its promise or fail to reach customers＇ expectations; consequently it will cause customers＇ dissatisfaction, complains and even the end of the deal. If an enterprise can adopt an appropriate and timely service recovery strategy when its customers perceive psychological contract violation, it may be helpful to reduce the loss caused by service failures and maintain customer loyalty. Based on the theories of psychological contract and customer loyalty and on the basis of literature review, this paper constructs a model displaying the influence of psychological contract violation on customer loyalty; the paper also analyzes the acting mechanism of psychological contract violation on customer loyalty and proves the moderating effect of service recovery strategies on that relationship. Adopting regression analysis method to analyze the data collected from a questionnaire survey to 262 hotel customers, this paper comes to two conclusions from the research results. Firstly, the two dimensions of psychological contract violation have an obvious negative impact on the two dimensions of customer loyalty, respectively. The higher the violation degree of customer psychological contract, the lower the customer loyalty is. Secondly, service recovery can partly regulate the relationship between psychological contract violation and customer loyalty. If an enterprise can adopt an appropriate and timely service recovery strategy when service failures occur and its customers perceive psychological contract violation, it may lower the negative effect of psychological contract violation on customer loyalty. The management implications of this research are as follows： firstly, hotel enterprises should enhance its management on service quality and make every effort to reduce service failures and psychological contract violation to acquire and maintain loyal customers. Secondly, psychological contract violation caused by service failures has an obvious negative impact on customer loyalty. Hotel enterprises should consider bring customer psychological contract management into line with the service marketing system and control the contents and dynamic changes of its customers＇ psychological contract and ensure the service quality through effective service management so as to avoid the occurrence of psychological contract violation and maintain customer loyalty. Thirdly, the moderating effect of service recovery strategies including precommunication postfeedback on the main variables is differentiated. Only when the enterprise adopts some effective service recovery strategies can it weaken customer psychological contract violation＇ s negative effect on customer lovahv caused by service failure.