Exploring Antecedents and Consequences of Customer Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (COCBs) through Customer Co-Creation Valuation

Abstract

Service-dominant logic views a customer as a proactive entity who co-creates value through collaboration with other entities in a value creation network. Working from that perspective, the current study investigated antecedents and consequences of customer organizational citizenship behaviors (COCBs), which refers to voluntary and discretionary behaviors that help marketers such as service organizations. Employing social exchange theory and personality concepts, this study set out to explain factors that lead customers to perform COCBs for their service organizations. In addition, this study conceptualized COCB motivation as an antecedent of COCB. Simultaneously, customer co-creation value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions were proposed as consequences of COCBs in the theoretical model. With an effort to fill the research gap pertaining to lack of scale items that measure COCBs, COCB motivation, and customer co-creation value, the present study employed a mixed methods approach based on both qualitative and quantitative research design. For the COCB and customer co-creation value construct, this study not only confirmed the measurability of the existing scale items but also found additional items, especially focusing on the offline service context. Additionally, scale items that measure COCB motivation, a construct that is newly proposed here, were developed and were categorized into four dimensions that represent COCB motivation - Self-enhancement, Personal principles, Desire to support the service organization, and Perceptions of the service organization's past performance. Data for hypotheses testing were collected via a web-based self-administered survey. Three versions of a questionnaire, based on three types of service organization, were used to elicit consumers' responses from a variety of service types. A total of 692 general U.S. consumers, who had had face-to-face interaction with service organizations in the prior six months, responded to the survey. The proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. In addition, to confirm whether there were differences in the relationships between proposed constructs among three types of service organizations, post-hoc analysis was conducted through multi-group analyses. The results of this study demonstrated the positive relationship between COCB motivation and COCBs. The results also provided support to the view that social exchange-based antecedents have strong positive impact on COCB motivation, and prosocial personality and proactive personality are important personality traits that stimulate customers to voluntarily participate in activities and/or tasks of the service organization. In addition, this study found that even though customers who participate in COCBs can perceive three types of co-creation value - economic co-creation value, individual co-creation value, and social co-creation value, they may be satisfied with service outcome and frontline employees only when they perceive individual co-creation value and social co-creation value. Furthermore, the findings of this study confirmed the spillover effect of transaction-specific satisfaction on overall satisfaction, which positively influences behavioral intentions such as intention to continue the relationship with the service organization and intention to recommend to other customers. Finally, the results of the post-hoc analysis revealed that there are no differences in most parts of the theoretical model across the three types of service organization except for four relationships - the impact of COCBs on social co-creation value, the impact of satisfaction with service outcome on satisfaction with service organization, the impact of satisfaction with frontline employees on satisfaction with service organization, and the impact of satisfaction with service organization on intention to recommend to other customers. Theoretical implications and managerial implications are discussed.