Review of Customer Citizenship Behaviors Scales in Service Perspective

Song Yang1,2 and Ma Qinhai1

2 1 School of Business Administration, Northeastern University School of Economic and Management, Shenyang Ligong University Shenyang China qudei@tom.com

Abstract. In service industry, customer behaviors are very important for the service delivery. Past research suggested that Customer Citizenship Behaviors will improve service quality and performance of firms. That how to measure Customer Citizenship Behaviors and whether the scales are suitable will influence the accuracy and scientific of empirical study. The thesis made a retrospect about related literatures about Customer Citizenship Behaviors, reviewed applied scales, and throw out suggestions for developing and applying of scales. Keywords: Customer Citizenship Behaviors, Scale, reliability.

1 Introduction
The globalization of the service industry and open international economy require service companies to enhance their competitiveness continually. Service companies have recently been paying more attention to customers in order to improve competitiveness[3]. The current service marketing literature focuses on managing customers as human resources (Bettencourt 1997; Dellande, Gilly, and Graham 2004; Groth 2005). In service firms, customers often act partial employees, participating in the service creation process (Bowenand Schneider, 1985) through the application of their knowledge and skills. This participation may be either in the form of in-role and/or extra-role behaviors (Bettencourt and Brown,1997).Customer in-role behaviors are those behaviors required to perform the service delivery. In contrast, extra-role behaviors are voluntary, helpful behaviors enacted towards the firm, service worker, or other customers that are not required for core service delivery. These behaviors can positively affect the performance of service workers, the organization, and even other consumers, and generally help to create a desirable setting for the parties in a service encounter. Examples might include gestures of appreciation to the service worker in the form of thank you notes or gifts, positive word-of-mouth, or suggestions for service improvements. These extra-role behaviors often involve a sacrifice on the customer's part in terms of time, effort, material possessions or even physical welfare ( Staub,1978), and are collectively referred to as Customer Citizenship Behaviors(hereinafter referred to as CCBs), similar to employee OCBs(Bettencourt,1997).
M. Dai et al. (Eds.): ICCIC 2011, Part I, CCIS 231, pp. 238243, 2011. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

Review of Customer Citizenship Behavior Scales in Service Perspective

239

At present, many scholars in china and abroad have concerned and been attention to the CCBs, but the research is still at the initial stage, especially in the measurement of CCBs. In order to providing the reference to other scholars in academe and practicing, the thesis compares and analyses some CCB scales by looking back many literatures.

2 Definition of Customer Citizenship Behaviors

In recent years, foreign scholar come up with the concept of Customer Citizenship Behaviors draw on the experience of organization Citizenship Behavior. Customers also provide citizenship behavior for a enterprise or employees, just as employees. Bowen(1986) has suggested that the important distinguish between service and manufacturing industry is customers take part in the process of service products producing in service industry, but customers only take part in the consuming in the manufacturing industry. Therefore, customers also are human resources in service organizations as employees. There are some literatures discussed that service organizations should really pay attention to customers, and should count them as members and employees of organization in a sense [5]. The terms used to label CCBs in the literature include(as shown in table1): Customer Voluntary Performance (Bailey et al., 2001; Bettencourt,1997; Rosenbaum and Massiah, 2007); Customer Extra-role Behaviors (Keh and Teo, 2001); customer OCBs (Liliana L. Bove,2008); or Customer Citizenship Behavior (Groth, 2005; Gruen, 1995).
Table 1. Terms used to label CCBs
Term Customer Voluntary Behavior Customer Extra-role Behavior Customer Organizational Citizenship Behaviors Researchers Bailey et al., 2001 ;Bettencourt,1997; Rosenbaum and Massiah, 2007 Keh and Teo, 2001:Liu Wenxiu,2007 Liliana L. Bove, 2008
Definition

Customer Citizenship Behavior

Groth, 2005; Gruen, 1995; Xie Lishan .2008; Hong Chongrong, 2005

Helpful, discretionary behaviors of customers that support the ability of the firm to deliver service quality Customers act promoters of firn voluntarily and provide behaviors which are benefit to firm. voluntary, helpful behaviors enacted towards the firm, service worker, or other customers that are not required for core service delivery behavior of customers that is discretionary; not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system; and that, in the aggregate, promotes the effective functioning of the organization

Data source: from related literatures

From the table1, the features of Customer Citizenship Behaviors are as follows [6]: 1) The behaviors are discretionary behaviors of customers, not the behaviors enterprises enforcing.

240

S. Yang and M. Qinhai

2) The behaviors are useful to organizations, and promote the effective functioning of the organization. 3) The behaviors are extra-role behaviors of customers, not obligatory behaviors for service delivery.

3 Review of Customer Citizenship Behavior Scales

Because Customer Citizenship Behaviors are benefit to firms, can enhance the quality of service and performance, more and more scholars began to pay attention to the behaviors. A large portion of the researches are empirical studies. So it is the crucial that how to reflect Customer Citizenship Behaviors objectively, effectively and accurately. Scale is a measure of Customer Citizenship Behaviors. It will affect the quality of researches. Based on the literatures in the Springer LINK, Science direct, Wiley InterScience and CNKI database for the past fifteen years, the scales were compared and analyzed. There are different scales for Customer Citizenship Behaviors from LANCE A. Bettercourt developed the scale which included three dimensions and seventeen items for grocery retailing in USA in 1997, showing in table 2. Some scales are developed by the scholars by de-contextualization approach; some scales are modified from Organization Citizenship Behaviors by adaptation approach. Some scales are reflection construct, some scales are formation construct. These scales come from different countries, such as USA, Australia, Korea, Taiwan. These scales have different dimensions, such as three dimensions, eight dimensions and four dimensions. The simplest scale includes only three items, the most complicated scale includes twenty-nine items. In some scales, Customer Citizenship Behaviors was as unidimensional construct, in the others, it was as multidimensional construct. The research involved different service scopes, including grocery retailing, medical service, hairdressing and e-service.
Table 2. Customer Citizenship Behaviors Scales list1
name CCB-A Customer OCBs CVP CCB-K CCB-T CERB researchers Groth Liliana L.Bove LANCE A. Bettencourt Youjae Yi Hong chongrong Liu wenxiu year 2005 2007 1997 2008 2005 2007 country Australia Australia USA Korea Taiwan Taiwan

1 2 3 4 5 6

Data source: from related literatures

The earliest Customer Citizenship Behaviors scale namely CVP was developed by LANCE A. Bettencourt in 1997. Seventeen items were generated based upon conceptual definitions and the literature review to measure the three dimensions of Customer Voluntary Performance. CCB-A was developed in a multistage process using the Q-Sort technique(Stephenson,1953) by Groth (Australia, 2005)a technique that has been
1

The scales were named by the abridge of the English name. Such as CVP was for the Customer Voluntary Behavior, the A, K and T of CCB-A CCB-K CCB-T stood for the country, namely Australia, Korea and Taiwan.

Review of Customer Citizenship Behavior Scales in Service Perspective

241

successfully used in the past to develop scales for organizational behavior constructs (e.g.,Greenberg,1986;OReilly,Chatman,&Caldwell 1991). The final measure consisted of 12 items, 4 items for each of the three dimensions of CCBs: making recommendations, providing feed back to the organization, and helping other customers. The number of items is moderate, several scholars have used the scale to measure Customer Citizenship Behaviors, including Youjae Yi (2006), Xie lishan(2007), Boris Bartikowski 2009 . After drawing scale items of customer OCBs from a number of sources (Bettencourt, 1997; Gruen, 1995), inter-item and item-to-total reliability tests and exploratory factor analyses were conducted by Liliana L.Bove (2008). From this process, 29 items remained for the next step. Three service contexts( pharmacy, hairdressing and medical services) where personal loyalty and customer OCBs are likely to be present, provide the industry back drop for the study. Liu wenxiu(2007) made Customer Citizenship Behaviors as unidimensional construct based on My3q website in Taiwan. CERB includes only three items(the number of items is least) . Hong chongrong(2005) developed CCB-T scale based on grocery in Taiwan. The scale includes four dimension, namely altruistic, conscientious, courteous and civic virtues, and twenty items. Youjae Yi presented two studies to research CCBs. In Study1, he gathered data from customers (students) of an executive-MBA program (i.e., a business-to-customer setting). In Study2, the researcher gathered data from customers (buyers) of organizational products (i.e., busiess-to-business setting). Customer citizenship behaviors was measured with seven-item scales adapted from prior research(Bettencourt,1997). Customer citizenship behaviors was modeled as formative measures.

Table 3. Base indicators of ccb scales
Name Indicator Scope Sample Dimensions Number Reliability/ validity Scope Sample Dimensions CCB-A Number Value Grocery retailing 215 customers Loyalty/ cooperation/ participation 17 Cronbach s values participation CFA 2 = 199.65, df = 116, 0.85; Loyalty 0.75 cooperation 0.69 p < 0.0001; CFI = 0.92; TLI = 0.91). e-service 191 adults were surveed at a southwestern U.S. county superior court jury pool. Recommendations /helping other customers/ providing feed Back to the organization 12 Almost all items loaded .70 or higher on the hypothesized factor(oneitem loaded.58), whereas almost allcrossloadings were below .30(one item had across-loading of .45). The three factors explained 76.63%of the total variance. Cronbach s values were between 0.8 and 0.93. internal correlation coefficents were between 0.56 and 0.78.

CVP

Reliability/ validity

242

S. Yang and M. Qinhai Table 3. (continued)

Scope Sample Dimensions Number Reliability/ validity Scope Sample Number Reliability/ validity Scope B 2 B Sample Number Reliability/ validity Scope Sample Dimensions Number Reliability/ validity Scope Sample Dimensions Number Reliability/ validity pharmacy, hairdressing medical ervices 484 customers (at least four visits per year) Positive word of mouth/ Displays of relationship/ afliation/ Participation in firm's/ activities/ Benevolent acts of service/ facilitation/ Flexibility/ Suggestions for service/improvements/ voice/ policing of other customers 29 Cronbach alpha values ranged from .78 to .94, composite reliabilities(CR range from .76 to .97 and average variance extracted(AVE) range from .55 to .80. GFI=.90,CFI=.96,TLI=.95,RMSEA=.048, and=748.50, df=349 P<.001 EMBA 209 EMBA students 7 The variance inflation factor(VIF) valuesVIF The buyer firms of organization products 68 buyers 5 The conditioning index was no higher than 10, and the maximum variance grocery 485 customers altruistic/conscientious/ courteous / civic virtues 20 Cronbach

Custom er OCBs

CC B-K

CCB-T

values almost all were higher than 0.7(one was 0.65)

CERB

e-service 209 website members ---------------------3 Cronbach s value was 0.92 CR was 0.75 AVE was 0.5

Data source: from related literatures

4 Recommendation
The research of Customer Citizenship Behaviors is in primary stage, the scales of CCBs are imperfect. There are some recommendations. First, in order to provide theoretical basis for scales, researchers should research CCBs theory deeply. Second, there are few Chinese authors to measure CCBs, and used the scales of other country. There are some limitations for adopting the West scales[7]. 1) cultural limitation. Because the CCBs theory comes from the west, the scales were developed based on observing and summing up for CCBs in the west. Chinese culture and value is a far cry from the wests, so researchers should consider the uniqueness of Chinese culture in measuring CCBs.

B 2 C

ranged from 1.2 to 3.0.

Review of Customer Citizenship Behavior Scales in Service Perspective

243

2)linguistic limitation. When the west scales are used, the accuracy of translation is a difficulty. Because the different of Chinese and western cultures, it is difficult to translation accurately. If the problems about translation can not solved, the reliability of research conclusion may be influenced. Hambleton and Patsula, 1998; Harkness, 2003 So it is essential to develop localization scale for CCBs fit for our own national conditions. In the last, past research about CCBs restricted to one context, so the universality of research conclusion is under testing.

References
1. Bettencourt, L.A.: Customer Voluntary Performance: Customers As Partners In Service Delivery. Journal of Retailing 73(3), 383406 (1997) 2. Groth, M.: Customers as Good Soldiers: Examining Citizenship Behaviors in Internet Service Deliveries. Journal of Management 31(1), 727 (2005) 3. Yi, Y.: The Antecedents and Consequences of Service Customer Citizenship and Badness Behavior. Seoul Journal of Business 12(2), 145176 (2006) 4. Bove, L.L.: Service worker role in encouraging customer organizational citizenship behaviors. Journal of Business Research 62(7), 698705 (2008) 5. Yi, Y.: The effects of customer justice perception and affect on customer citizenship behavior and customer dysfunctional behavior. Industrial Marketing Management 37(7), 767783 (2008a) 6. Xie, l., Shen, w., Liang, x.: The research of the relation of customers perceived service justice and customer citizenship behavior based Internet. Management Review 20(6), 1724 (2008) 7. Chen, x., Xue, s., Fan, j.: Empirical Method in Organization and Management Research. Peking University Publishing House, Beijing (2008) 8. Fan, j., Kong, j.: The research of customer citizenship behaviors Abroad. Foreign Economic & Management 31(9), 4752 (2009) 9. Markus, G.: Customers as Good Soldiers:Extending Organizational Citizenship Behavior Research to the Customer Domain. Journal of Management 31(1), 415433 (2005) 10. Wu, r., Li, d.: Positive consuming behaviorconcept and scale developing. Management Science 22(5), 7280 (2009)