The effect of online service recovery on costumer citizenship behavior: A research on hospitality enterprises

This research aims to examine the effect of service recovery methods applied by enterprises against service failures, which are seen as inevitable for hospitality, on customer citizenship behavior seen as voluntary customer behaviors. For this purpose, data were collected by scenario technique to test the multi-group structural equation model developed using the Theory of Justice, Social Exchange Theory, and Prospect Theory. The scenario technique is considered a quasi-experimental research technique in which events that could happen in real life are conveyed in accordance with the study purpose to the participants with fictional scenarios, and participants are asked to answer a survey as if they had experienced the events described in the scenarios. In line with the purpose of the study, consisting of combinations of two service failure severity (high/low) and three service recovery types (apology/coupon/donation) six scenarios (2 x 3 = 6) were developed. 396 participants with online reservation experience were randomly assigned to one of the six scenarios. By using multi-group structural equation modeling, the group exposed to low severity failure and the group exposed to high severity failure were examined both in a single model as a full sample and in different models separately. The results obtained from the full sample show that justice perceptions positively affect recovery satisfaction, and recovery satisfaction positively affects customer citizenship behavior. In addition, it was determined that distributive justice was the most effective type of justice on recovery satisfaction in the full sample. According to the results of the multi-group structural equation model, failure severity does not have a significant moderator effect on the relationship between types of justice and recovery satisfaction, but it has a moderator effect on the relationship between recovery satisfaction and customer citizenship behavior. It is understood from the results obtained recovery satisfaction is more effective on advocacy and tolerance behaviors at low severity failure, while this effect decreases at high severity failure. Finally, it has seen that distributive justice is more effective on recovery satisfaction at high severity group and interactional justice is more effective at low severity failure group.