The effect of customer satisfaction and its antecedents on customer citizenship behavior in airlines: A cross-cultural comparison

Customer citizenship behavior, which expresses actions that add value to the business, such as providing feedback to the firms, tolerating disruptions, and helping other customers, is vital in improving the service experience in the airline industry, where services are provided collectively and in a shared environment. In this regard, the topic of how to encourage consumers to engage in customer citizenship behaviors in the airline industry must be highlighted. This thesis research aims to investigate the effect of customer satisfaction and its antecedents on customer citizenship behavior in the airline industry. In this regard, service quality and value for money were used as the antecedents of customer satisfaction based on the Expectation Confirmation Theory. The dimensions of feedback, advocacy, helping, and tolerance were used to operationalize the customer citizenship behavior. In addition, Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory is also incorporated into the conceptual model, as the antecedents of customer citizenship behaviors may vary across national cultures. In doing so, data were collected from Turkish and British airline consumers representing different national cultures, based on a quantitative research design using the survey technique. The web-based questionnaire yielded 420 valid responses from British airline customers and 323 valid responses from Turkish airline customers. Using the 5.000 resampling technique via partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), a significant effect of service quality and value for money on customer satisfaction was observed for both samples. In addition, customer satisfaction significantly predicts customer citizenship behaviors such as feedback, advocacy, helping, and tolerance. Then, the permutation test and Henseler's multigroup analysis were applied to the conceptual model to test whether the hypothesized relationships differs significantly between Turkish and British samples. Accordingly, the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction and the effect of customer satisfaction on advocacy and helping behaviors differ significantly.