Service fairness and customer satisfaction: Mediating role of customer psychological empowerment
Journal of Contemporary Marketing Science
ISSN: 2516-7480
Article publication date: 19 June 2019
Issue publication date: 12 August 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between service fairness and customer satisfaction, and test the mediation role of customer psychological empowerment in this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional empirical study is designed to test the research model. Customers of retail bank in South China are surveyed. Regression analysis and structural equation model analysis are done with SPSS 21.0 and LISREL 8.72 separately.
Findings
The results indicate that: first, service fairness increases customer satisfaction. Specifically, distributive fairness, procedural fairness and interactional fairness affect customer satisfaction positively and directly, while informational fairness affects customer satisfaction indirectly. Second, customer psychological empowerment fully mediates the relationship between informational fairness and customer satisfaction, while plays a partial mediating role between distributive fairness, procedural fairness, interactional fairness and customer satisfaction. Third, four kinds of service fairness have different influences on three dimensions of customer psychological empowerment.
Practical implications
The findings provide suggestions for managers to improve customer psychological empowerment by treating customer fairly, and to increase customer satisfaction through empowering customer in services, especially for state-owned banks.
Originality/value
It is recognized that service fairness leads to customer satisfaction in marketing literature; however, the empirical research studies about this are rare. This research not only contributes to service fairness theory, but also enriches our understanding of customer empowerment in service process.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research is sponsored by the National Nature Foundation of China (71,272,194), and Nature Foundation of Guangdong (2018A030313862). The authors greatly appreciate the very important suggestions of the anonymous reviewers. A version of this paper was published in Chinese language which can be seen in Han, X.Y., Xie, L.S. and Yang, J.F. (2011), “Customer empowerment and its relationship with service fairness,” Journal of Marketing Science in China, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 111-122 (in Chinese).
Citation
Han, X., Fang, S., Xie, L. and Yang, J. (2019), "Service fairness and customer satisfaction: Mediating role of customer psychological empowerment", Journal of Contemporary Marketing Science, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 50-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCMARS-01-2019-0003
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited