Kimmy Wa Chan

Strengthening Customer Loyalty Through Intimacy and Passion: Roles of Customer–Firm Affection and Customer–Staff Relationships in Services

This study extends the existing satisfaction–trust–loyalty paradigm to investigate how customers’ affectionate ties with firms (customer–firm affection)—in particular, the components of intimacy and passion—affect customer loyalty in services. In a bilevel model, the authors consider customer–staff and customer–firm interactions in parallel. Through a netnography study and survey research in two service contexts, they confirm (1) the salience of intimacy and passion as two underrecognized components of customer–firm affection that influence customer loyalty, (2) the complementary and mediating role of customer–firm affection in strengthening customer loyalty, (3) significant affect transfers from the customer–staff to the customer–firm level, and (4) the dilemma that emerges when customer–staff relationships are too close. The findings provide several implications for researchers and managers regarding how intimacy and passion can enrich customer service interactions and how to manage customer–staff relationships properly.

Do Customers and Employees Enjoy Service Participation? Synergistic Effects of Self- and Other-Efficacy

Extant research confirms the importance of value cocreation through customer participation (CP), but relatively little is known about whether and how it creates an enjoyable experience for customers and service employees and the consequential outcomes of this positive affective experience. This study applies the concept of flow as an overarching framework and draws theoretical support from social cognitive theory, particularly its extension (i.e., the conceptual model of relational efficacy beliefs), to examine how customers and employees derive enjoyment from CP conditional on their perceived efficacy of themselves (self-efficacy [SE]) and their partners (other-efficacy [OE]) in financial services. Empirical results from 223 client–financial adviser dyads confirm that participation enjoyment, in addition to economic and relational values, mediates the impact of CP on participants’ satisfaction evaluations, with SE positively moderating CPs impact on participation enjoyment. The synergistic effect of SE and OE on participation enjoyment also differs for clients versus financial advisers: Even incongruent levels of SE and OE can enhance participation enjoyment as long as they help validate role expectations of the respective participants.

Assessing Celebrity Endorsement Effects in China: A Consumer-Celebrity Relational Approach

ABSTRACT Celebrity endorsement is a salient executional strategy in china, where national celebrities often endorse more than 20 brands. This paper adopts a relational perspective to examine this research issue. The relational perspective is driven by three core chinese cultural values: collectivism, risk aversion, and power distance. The authors propose a model that postulates how celebrity-worship leads to value transfer that, in turn, affects brand purchase intent. Findings from a survey involving 1,030 respondents from a national panel of consumers, showed that consumer celebrity worship is a significant antecedent to endorser effects; over-endorsement by a celebrity is an important moderator; and the model is robust across both sports and entertainment celebrities.

Do employee citizenship behaviors lead to customer citizenship behaviors? The roles of dual identification and service climate

This study pertains to whether and how employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors toward customers (OCB-C) influence customers’ citizenship behaviors (CCB) directed toward the firm, employees, and other customers. Drawing on a social exchange perspective, this study proposes that a dual identification mechanism—spanning customer-employee identification (C-EI) and customer-firm identification (C-FI)—mediates the social exchange relationship between OCB toward customers (OCB-C) and CCB. Service climate as a key contextual factor moderates the mediating mechanisms of identification. With data collected from a field survey and an experiment, the findings confirm that the dual identification mechanism mediates the effect of OCB-C on customers’ reciprocation with CCB. The results also reveal a moderating effect of service climate, such that the positive effect of OCB-C on C-EI and C-FI grows stronger when the service climate is at low and high levels, respectively. In addition, the empirical results demonstrate that the underlying motive attribution explains the moderating effect of service climate. This work paints a more nuanced picture of the missing link in the OCB-C-CCB interface by identifying a mediating mechanism and boundary condition. To promote CCB, managers should leverage their employees’ OCB-C as well as their firms’ service climate.