The Effects of Relationship Quality on Customer Retaliation
Marketing Letters, January 2006, Volume 17, Issue 1, pp 31-46
University of Alberta School of Business Research Paper No. 2013-372
17 Pages Posted: 26 Aug 2014
Date Written: June 5, 2013
Abstract
This research examines the effects of relationship quality (RQ) on customers' desires to retaliate after service failures. We posit that the effects of RQ are contingent upon the attributions customers make about the firm’s controllability over a service failure. Two competing hypotheses are examined and reconciled. The "love is blind" hypothesis posits that when low controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a lesser desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. On the other hand, the "love becomes hate" hypothesis specifies that when high controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a greater desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. The hypotheses are tested with a survey-based design and a partial least squares (PLS) model that incorporates a multiplicative latent construct.
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