دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی وارونه کردن رابطه وابستگی- اعتماد در خدمات کسب و کار به مصرف کننده - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

While the existing notion of customer dependency in the business-to-business literature is that it facilitates trust, this study proposes that the relationship works in reverse for services firm–consumer dependency relationships. Using partial least squares-based structural equation modeling, the study provides evidence that rapport through service interactions and the mediation impact of competence, contractual, and goodwill trust build an evoked set of services in consumers’ minds, making them dependent on the firm at a cognitive level. However, most of the moderated and moderated mediation roles of relationship age and frequency are found as non-significant except relationship age as a moderated mediator between goodwill trust and consumer dependency relationship. Implications are provided for the services relationship literature and services firms.

6. Implications and future research directions

6.1. Theoretical implications

While dependency has been widely discussed in the B2B context (such as the manufacturer–retailer relationship, buyer–supplier relationship, etc.) in the existing body of the literature (Barnes et al., 2005; Joshi and Arnold, 1997), this study provides new grounds for research by exploring the role of dependency in the consumer domain. The current study claims that, unlike the buyer–supplier relationship, services consumers first develop trust for a services firm based on their previous experiences with service interactions and then eventually, consciously or unconsciously, they become dependent on the services of that service provider. This unique finding on the trust–consumer dependency relationship in the B2C context opens a new area of future research in the services literature.

Moreover, the current study identifies the separate impacts of competence trust, contractual trust, and goodwill trust on consumer dependency as it uses the multidimensionality of trust instead of using trust as a unidimensional construct (DeWitt et al., 2008; Writz and Lwin, 2009). The study, thus, takes the first step by providing a comparative picture of the effects of different types of trust on developing consumer dependency, thus further extending the boundary of the literature by confirming that each type of trust behaves differently in developing consumer dependency. The study’s findings show that competence trust has the strongest impact on consumer dependency, followed by goodwill trust and contractual trust. These findings serve as grounds for future research focused on the strong association between competence trust and consumer dependency.