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.
