1. Introduction
Building a sustainable relationship with consumers is the biggest challenge for brands. Past research on the bilateral brand-consumer relationship has mostly focused on the passive role of customers; however, recent literature has proposed that customers are not passive respondents but active participants [
1]. With the development of information technology and the popularity of smartphones, customers are able to share their experiences of using products with others and propose suggestions to brands, interact with similar customers in online brand communities and so on. Such behaviours are called consumer citizenship behaviours [
2]. Citizenship behaviour is not a requirement for a successful product or service delivery, but it has positive effects on brand image and brand relationships [
3]. Recent research on the interactive process of the consumer-brand relationship has typically explored it from two perspectives to acquire an in-depth understanding of this phenomenon [
3,
4,
5].
Psychological contract theory offers a unique view to explain the bilateral reciprocal customer brand relationship [
6]. Consumers form beliefs about the reciprocal obligations between themselves and the brand, and these obligations are based on perceived promises and expectations [
7]. Psychological contracts represent consumers’ structured knowledge about the patterns of resource exchange between two parties in a relationship. During the relationship-building process, consumers first form expectations from the brand’s advertisement or consumption norms. Consumers and brands interact with each other through the steps of consumption. Consumers may feel satisfied with and trust a brand when it fulfils their expectations. Some consumers even feel grateful to the brands [
3] and positively recommend them to other consumers. However, when brands violate expectations, these high-commitment consumers (compared with low-commitment consumers) show stronger negative changes in attitude [
8]. Healthy relationships between consumers and brands are often disrupted by events such as brand transgressions, product harm crises, and service failures. For example, Tesla promised a Chinese customer the opportunity to be the first Tesla car owner, but the promise was ultimately broken. The customer was deeply angry and destroyed the new Tesla car in an act of revenge.
When consumers perceive that a brand has not fulfilled a commitment, they may feel betrayed and behave negatively toward the company. Their relationship may reach its endpoint: brand aversion [
9]. Recent research has shown that consumer perceptions of violations in (vs. out of) contracts result in a negative attitude [
8]. Whether a contract breach affects consumer citizenship behaviour and its process needs further theoretical exploration. Most of the published literature focuses on the antecedents of the positive side of consumer citizenship behaviours. For example, consumers have been found to perform citizenship behaviours when a company’s reputation is good [
10], the employees are benevolent [
11], other consumers also perform citizenship behaviours [
12], they have agreeableness and extraversion personalities [
13] and so on. Only a scattering of research has explored the negative side, and the results have shown that service scripts have a negative effect on consumer citizenship behaviours when the service is performed by employees with low customer orientation [
14]. Furthermore, there are different types of psychological contracts (relational contract and transactional contract): the relational dimension reflects the long-term, interactive component and the transactional contract involves the consumer’s short-term economic expectation from the brand. The two types of contract breaches are known to have different effects on employees’ organisational citizenship behaviour [
15]. However, less is known about the different effects of the two psychological contract breaches on consumer citizenship behaviours.
With the aim of closing the above-mentioned gaps in the literature, this study addresses the above issues by exploring the impact of the two types of contract breaches on consumer citizenship behaviours. We demonstrate that different types of breaches (relational contract and transactional contract) have different impacts on customer citizenship behaviours. Thus, this research contributes to the literature on the customer-brand relationship and consumer citizenship behaviours. Most of the previous research on the psychological contract has focused on transactional contracts in the employee-company context. Moreover, we uncover an important antecedent that negatively influences consumer citizenship behaviours. Customers’ active participation plays a more important role than ever before, and both their positive and negative participations have big effects on the quality of the customer-brand relationship. From a practical perspective, identifying negative antecedents of customer citizenship behaviours is very urgent for marketing managers who strive to maintain healthy customer relationships.
The remainder of this article is organised as follows. We first present our theoretical background, conceptualisation and hypothesis development. Next, the research methodology is presented, which includes the design of the study, research materials, and research results. The final section summarises the findings and offers managerial implications.
5. Discussion
In this study, we tested a framework of psychological contract breaches and citizenship behaviours in the customer-brand relationship context. We assessed the relative impact of two types of contract breaches on customers’ recommendation, voice and helping behaviours and the mediating role of psychological contract violation.
The results show that the effect of a relational contract breach was different between dimensions of customer citizenship behaviours: it had a direct significant negative effect on recommendation behaviours, but no direct effect on voice and helping behaviours. We did observe a direct positive effect of relational contract breaches on voice behaviours. It is possible that customers want to express their negative experiences and provide suggestions to the brand. The effect of the relational contract breach on recommendation and helping behaviours was mediated by participants’ perception of psychological contract violation. The results indicate that relational contract breach led to a negative emotional experience, and these emotional experiences decreased recommendation and helping behaviours overall. Our findings are generally consistent with the findings of Morrison and Robinson (1997). The relational psychological contract inspires a greater sense of participation and belonging, and customers are highly affectively involved in relational contracts. When a company cannot fulfil its relational contract, customers experienced high levels of psychological contract violation, followed by decreased recommendation and helping behaviours.
Furthermore, the results show a very different pattern for the transactional contract breach and customer citizenship behaviours. We found that the transactional contract breach had direct negative influences on two dimensions of citizenship behaviours, namely recommendation and helping behaviours. This finding is also consistent with observations in an organisation context [
31]; minor and early contract breaches were shown to potentially trigger negative behaviour directly. However, the transactional contract breach directly led to lower helping behaviours, while transactional contract violation lead to more helping behaviours. This may be attributed to the transactional contract obligations between customers and brands. Customers who have a transactional contract with a brand focuse on specific economic expectations; they may want to help other consumers avoid bad situations after their own violation experiences.
This research makes three theoretical contributions. First, we established the relationship between psychological contract breaches and citizenship behaviours in the customer-brand context. We also extended the literature on the outcomes of psychological contract breaches. Most psychological contract research has focused on transactional contracts in the employee-company context, and research on relational psychological contracts in the customer-company context is nascent [
23]. Most of these studies have mainly focused on the effects of psychological contract breaches on the customer’s reuse intentions, trust and satisfaction [
24]. Our results reveal that the two types of contract breaches have different influences on customer citizenship behaviours. Second, we extended the research scope of customer citizenship behaviours. Customers’ active participation plays a more important role than ever before. We uncovered an important antecedent that negatively influences customer citizenship behaviours. Third, we differentiated the role of psychological contract violation into two kinds of relationship. Our findings suggest that the paths by which breaches affect customer citizenship behaviours are different. The results show that psychological contract violation partially mediated the effect of a transactional contract breach on customer recommendation behaviours, and it fully mediated the effect of a relational contract breach on helping behaviours.
The findings above have several managerial implications. Throughout the experiments in our research, transactional contract breaches and relational contract breaches had different effects on customer citizenship behaviours. Therefore, in the context of a contract breach, managers should first identify the type of contract breach. A relational contract breach involves failing to respect the customer’s identity or his or her long-term symbolic value, while a transactional contract breach reflects the consumer’s disappointment with short-term economic value, such as an unexpected high price or low product quality. Managers should have some strategic awareness that there exist two types of contract breaches that can negatively influence customer citizenship behaviours. In addition, managers should offer convenient channels for customers to provide feedback and suggestions (voice behaviours) to the company. The findings of this research suggest that customers may even increase their voice behaviour when they perceive a relational contract breach. For example, companies can offer connected interactive channels, such as an email address and social media contact, to customers. Moreover, managers should monitor consumers’ word of mouth (WOM), since both relational and transactional contract breaches had direct negative influence on consumers’ recommendations. If managers can resolve these contract breaches as soon as possible, consumers may not decrease their recommendation behaviours. In other words, in order to maintain a sustainable consumer-brand relationship, managers should focus on the early steps of a contract breach, offer convenient interactive channels and monitor customers’ WOM.
This study has some limitations. First, our participants are college students, so the results may have limited external validity. Although college students are suitable for testing theory [
34], further investigation is needed to clarify whether other groups exhibit the same patterns. Second, because this study focused on the main effect of contract breaches on citizenship behaviour in the customer-brand context and on the mediating role of contract violation, we did not consider other interpretation processes between the contract breach and contract violation [
17]. Since an experimental method was used in our study, the scenarios were hypothetical, and further tests are needed to determine whether other scenarios in other industries produce similar results. At the same time, important factors in the interpretation process, such as fairness judgment and the social contract, were balanced with the hypothetical scenarios. Future studies could explore how the interpretation process moderates the effect of contract breaches on violation in the customer-brand context.