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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 148 (2014) 680 – 685

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A research on reference behavior trend according to Horney’s

personality types
Serdar Aydin, Hasan Huseyin Ceylan, Erhan Aydin*
Usak University, Usak 64100, Turkey

Abstract

According to Horney who is a representative of socio-psychological theory, there are three types of personalities: Compliant,
aggressive and detached. Behavior of individuals may change according to these personality types. On the other hand, reference
behavior is defined as word of mouth communication and it provides an important knowledge sharing. Word of mouth
communication is an effective communication type, which is used for affecting purchasing behavior of consumers and providing
brand loyalty.
In this study, it was examined whether the relationship between personality types and word of mouth tendency exists. Data
obtained from university students was analyzed by the structural equation modeling. According to research findings, there is a
positive relationship between compliant personality type and word of mouth communication. Beside that there is no relationship
between word of mouth communication and aggressive and detached personality types.
© 2014
© 2014 Elsevier
The Authors. Published
Ltd. This by Elsevier
is an open Ltd. under the CC BY-NC-ND license
access article
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the 2nd International Conference on Strategic Innovative Marketing.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the 2nd International Conference on Strategic Innovative Marketing.
Keywords: Horney’s personality types, reference behavior, consumer behavior

1. Introduction

It is assumed that there is a relationship between personality and consumer behavior in marketing. Moreover,
certain personalities are aimed to bring into goods and brands since they are accepted as extension of personality
(Levy, 1959: Malhotra, 1981: Sirgy, 1982: Belk 1988: Kleine ve Kernan, 1991: Kleine vd., 1995; Aaker, 1997:
Puzakova vd., 2009). The assumption about personality is also applicable for communication. Accordingly, people

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 276 2212121; fax: +90 276 2212202.
E-mail address: erhan.aydin@usak.edu.tr

1877-0428 © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the 2nd International Conference on Strategic Innovative Marketing.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.07.014
 Serdar Aydin et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 148 (2014) 680 – 685 681

communicate with others via goods and services (Veblen, 2007: Holman 1980: Kleine ve Kernan, 1988: Holbrook
ve Hirschman, 1982: McCracken, 1990: Solomon, 1983). People develop consuming behaviours, which are suitable
with their personalities and also they can communicate with other people with these consuming behaviours. Word of
mouth is a type of interpersonal communication, which is becoming more important phenomenon in consumer
behaviour. People are becoming more insensitive and losing their trust as a result of thousands of data via mass
media. Therefore, people go towards individual information sources in which they can trust more and this helps to
ease their purchasing decision (Feldman ve Spencer, 1965: Arndt , 1967: Engel vd, 1969: Richins, 1983: Reingen ve
Kernan, 1986: Brown ve Reingen, 1987: Herr vd., 1991: Buttle, 1998).
Karen Horney claims that people can be classified into three personality types (Schiffman ve Kanuk, 1994:135).
Karen Horney’s model of three types of personality helps to describe people’s perception of environment and
behaviour trend towards things. The three personalities are based on the three different coping strategies researched
by Karen Horney as follows: compliant, aggressive and detached (Cohen, 1967:270).

2. Conceptual Framework

2.1. Compliant Personality Type

Compliant personality type individuals want to feel they are loved, accepted, liked, approved and appreciated.
And also they want to be needed, cared, helped, protected and guided by others. These individuals are sensitive to
others’ needs in their social environment. They try to meet expectation of others spontaneously. Thus, they are
compatible, thoughtful, grateful and generous within their environment. In fact, any experience that is not shared
with others is nonsense for these individuals (Horney, 2012:38-42).

2.2. Aggressive Personality Type

Aggressive personality type individuals assume that everybody is an enemy. The important rules are that
individual look out only for his/her own benefits. The main need of this person is exerting dominance on others.
This person wants to be superior, successful, prestigious and known by others. According to these people, being
approved, liked and superior makes them feel powerful. Mostly, they present themselves as the most powerful, the
most cunning and the most wanted people; that’s why they try to develop certain skills and proficiency which can
make them exactly what they want to be seen (Horney, 2012:48-53).

2.3. Detached Personality Type

Detached personality type individuals become alienated to others. These individuals put some emotional distance
between them and other individuals. They do not communicate with others and try to become self-sufficient. They
do not like socializing and long-term social obligations. Detached personality type people are quite secretive and do
not talk about their private life. Contrary to compliant personality type individuals they do not approve to share any
type of experiences. The important values according to them are, not to be under influence, staying away from
pressure, not to attached with anybody. They do not like social norms. They resist to advice and suggestions of
others since they feel dominated (Horney, 2012:55-60).

2.4. Word of Mouth Communication

Word of mouth communication is an informal information flow between consumers about the goods and services
which they use or have and the thoughts about service providers. There are three motives behind word of mouth
communication: (1) good/service interest of consumers; consumers like to talk about a product or their satisfaction
on that product, (2) individual interest; consumers wants to satisfy emotional needs such as getting attention, to be
known and gaining social status, (3) other interests; consumers share knowledge and experience with other
consumers in order to feel helped, loved and cared (Westbrook, 1987:261).
682 Serdar Aydin et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 148 (2014) 680 – 685

3. Research Hypotheses

The aim of this paper is to research consumer’s tendency to engage in word of mouth communication in the
context of Horney’s three personality types. Thus three main hypotheses were set:
H1: There is a positive relationship between compliant personality type and word of mouth communication.
Because compliant type of personality necessitate the communication with environment, being accepted, loved,
approved, and sharing can only be done via communication. Therefore the compliant type of personality individuals
can be expected to engage in word of mouth communication (Horney, 2012:38-42).
H2: There is a positive relationship between aggressive personality type and word of mouth communication.
Because aggressive type of personality individuals use different tools; but they also want to be successful,
respected, prestigious, appreciated and to dominate other people. These people share their knowledge and
experiences to gain the things listed above. Thus, they are expected to communicate word of mouth (Horney,
2012:48-53).
H3: There is a negative relationship between detached personality type and word of mouth communication.
Because main needs of these individuals are becoming self-sufficient, being skillful and being quite secretive about
their private life. Therefore, they are expected not to engage in word of mouth communication (Horney, 2012:55-
60).

4. Methodology

The population of the study consists of students of Usak University. Data gathered by face to face questionnaire
from 400 students, which are selected by convenience sampling. 14 questionnaires, which are incomplete and
imprecise, are excluded. Therefore the remaining 386 questionnaires underwent further analysis. Research sample
consists of 154 female and 214 male students.
In the study the personality scale is adapted from Horney-Coolidge Type Inventory (HCTI) and the reference
behaviour scale is adapted from Hoffman (2001). While adapting the scales in Turkish, dual translation (back) is
used (McGorry, 2000: 76). In both scales 5-point Likert scale “1= strongly disagree............5=strongly agree” is
used.
In this study SPSS 18 is used for exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis and Lisrel 8.7 is used for
structural equation modelling. Structural equation modelling is a statistical technique for testing and estimating
causal relations using a combination of statistical data and widely accepted by academics. Although, analysis such
as, multiple regression analysis, factor analysis and discriminant analysis can answer administrative and theoretic
questions of academics, they have certain limitedness. The most important limitedness is analysing only one
relationship at a time. On the other hand, structural equation modelling which can be seen as a combination of
factor and multiple regression analysis, all the relationships in the model can be analysed at the same time (Hair vd.,
2006: 703-704). The other advantage of structural equation modelling is to enable analysing mediation relationships.
Mediation relationships, which can be described as a third variable plays an important role in governing the
relationship between the other two variables, are vital in social and medical fields (MacKinnon: 2008).
Structural equation modelling, which consists of two sections such as measurement model and structural model,
is used to validate the theoretic model of researcher. Such models specify the relations between a set of observed
variables, and the unobserved variables. Latent variables are variables that are not directly observed but are
measured through other variables that are directly observed. On the other hand, direct and indirect relationships
among latent variables are analysed in structural model (Ho, 2006: 283).

5. Analysis and Results

In the study, varimax rotation and exploratory factor analysis are done to see factor structure of the scales.
Factors, Factor Loadings, KMO, Sphericity Test and Reliability Results are shown in Table 1.
Appropriateness of factor structure can be evaluated with Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity in exploratory factor
analysis. The result of Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity should be significant for the Appropriateness of factor structure
 Serdar Aydin et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 148 (2014) 680 – 685 683

(Hair vd. 2006: 114). Appropriateness of the sample size can be evaluated by KMO test. KMO value should be at
least 0,5 (Kaiser, 1974: 35). If Cronbach’s α of a scale between 0.60≤ α ≤ 0.80 is accepted highly reliable scales
(Kalaycı, 2005: 405).
In this study KMO, Sphericity test and Reliability Test results are acceptable as it is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Result of Exploratory Factor Analysis

1 2 3 4 α
Reference Behavior 0,84
RB1 ,892
RB2 ,844
RB3 ,824
RB4 ,683
Compliant Type Personality 0,68
CTP1 ,735
CTP2 ,723
CTP3 ,686
CTP4 ,671
Detached Type Personality 0,67
DTP1 ,750
DTP2 ,707
DTP3 ,681
DTP4 ,671
Aggressive Type Personality 0,62
ATP1 ,751
ATP2 ,706
ATP3 ,664
ATP4 ,588
KMO=0,77; Bartlett's Test of Sphericity= 0,000

In the second stage of the study, theoretic model is analysed by structural equation modelling. For this reason the
measurement model, which can be described as confirmatory factor analysis, is analysed. In measurement model the
relationship between factors and items of factor is tested. t value is used to evaluate the significance of relationships
between the factors and their items in the measurement model and goodness of fit values is used to evaluate if the
whole model fits with data. If the t value exceeds the critical value of 1.96 at the 0.05 significance level, then this
parameter is accepted as significant. (Ho, 2006: 298). According to the results in Table 2, all t values in the
measurement model are statistically significant. Goodness of fit of the measurement model is above the acceptable
values, which means the measurement model is supported by data. After that, structural equation model analysis is
done.

Table 2. Measurement model values

Standardized Path
T Values Construct reliability
Reference Behavior 0,79
RB1 12,29 0,61
RB2 16,65 0,77
RB3 20,92 0,90
RB4 18,18 0,82
Compliant Type Personality 0,68
CTP1 11,70 0,68
CTP2 9,30 0,54
CTP3 10,10 0,59
CTP4 9,61 0,56
Detached Type Personality 0,79
DTP1 10,28 0,56
DTP2 13,47 0,71
DTP3 12,03 0,65
DTP4 12,80 0,68
684 Serdar Aydin et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 148 (2014) 680 – 685

Aggressive Type Personality 0,69

ATP1 8,49 0,52
ATP2 8,40 0,52
ATP3 7,94 0,49
ATP4 10,77 0,68

In structural model analysis, the compatibility of relationships between latent variables is analysed. Firstly, t
values are used to evaluate the statistical significance of relationships between latent variables. T value of the paths
between detached and aggressive personality types latent variables and reference behaviour latent variable is not
significant. As a result, there is no significant relationship between detached and aggressive personality types and
reference behaviour. On the other hand, t value of the path between compliant personality type latent variable and
reference latent variable is significant. However, the goodness of fit value is examined to evaluate the model and
data compatibility since the significance of t value is not enough. In Table 3 goodness of fit values and acceptable
reference range is shown. The goodness of fit values of the structural model is above the acceptable values.

Table 3. Goodness of Fit Reference Range and Structural Model Values

Values of this Acceptable Goodness of Fit

Goodness of Fit Criteria
study Values
X2/df 1,46 2 < X2/df ≤ 3
RMSEA 0,036 .5 < RMSEA ≤ .8
Comparative Fit Index (CFI) 0,97 .95 ≤ CFI < .97
Standardized RMR 0,045 .05 <SRMR ≤ .10
Goodness of Fit Index (GFI) 0,95 .90 ≤ GFI < .95
Adjusted Goodness of Fit Index (AGFI) 0,94 .85 ≤ AGFI < .90
Source: Hu ve Bentler, 1999

In the result of analysis, hypotheses are evaluated as below:

H1: There is a positive relationship between compliant personality type and reference behavior (ACCEPTED)
H2: There is a positive relationship between aggressive personality type and reference behavior (REJECTED)
H3: There is a negative relationship between detached personality type and reference behavior (REJECTED)

6. Conclusion

In this research, Horney’s Personality Types is used to explore personality types and word mouth of
communication. According to findings there is a relationship between compliant personality type and word mouth of
communication however, there is no relationship between aggressive and detached personality type and word mouth
of communication. As a result first hypothesis is accepted, second and third hypotheses are rejected. It is believed
that compliant type of personality individuals’ desire of having warm relationship and sharing experiences with
others makes them to communicate word of mouth. Detached type of personality individuals are evaluated not to
communicate word of mouth since they are more into themselves and avoid to share knowledge and experiences
about their private life. In the research it was assumed that the aggressive type of personality individuals
communicate word of mouth because of their desires to be respected, liked and dominate other people. However,
there is a negative relationship between aggressive personality type and word of mouth communication in the
findings. Even it is positive or negative, aggressive type of personality individuals being selfish may prevent them to
share their experiences and knowledge with others. It is believed that these individuals mostly behave pragmatically
and they avoid sharing their experiences and knowledge if they do not benefit from it.
Marketing managers should identify their consumers’ personalities and then communicate with them. They can
develop new strategies to encourage the compliant types to word of mouth communication. Marketing managers
should satisfy the other type of personality consumers individually. On the other hand, the compliant types have
both positive and negative potential for the firms. Therefore, firms should behave more careful and sensitive for
these types of consumers.
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