We Want Nice Customers! Empathy and Server Disclosure as Antecedents of Customer Citizenship Behavior

We Want Nice Customers! Empathy and Server Disclosure as Antecedents of Customer Citizenship Behavior

Customers now involve actively with employees during a service process, breaking out of their traditional roles as a passive recipient. This transition has named customers as value co-creators which shows how much customers can influence on service and specifically, employees. From the view of value co-creation and its embedded two-way relationship between customers and employees, customer citizenship behavior, or customers ’ going extra mile behaviors, has been given attention. Such customers ’ out- role behavior leads to beneficial outcomes for service organizations to be competitive in the saturated restaurant market. Thus, this study attempted to identify the antecedents of customer citizenship behavior in the restaurant context. Empathy and Server Disclosure -were explored as independent variables. For data collection, a 2 (high empathy vs low empathy) X2 (servers ’ disclosure information vs no servers ’ disclosure information) factorial experimental design with written scenarios was used. A total of 217 customers in the U.S -were gathered. The data results support all the hypotheses suggested in the current study, suggesting empathy and server disclosure are positively related to customer citizenship behavior. This study adds the hospitality literature by examining empathy as an influencing factor of customer citizenship behavior in line with previous studies investigating the impact of empathy on employees ’ citizenship behavior. In addition, this research is one of the early studies exploring the impact of server disclosure on customer citizenship behavior. This study will be helpful for managers in restaurant industry to understand the importance of customer citizenship behavior and to build strategies to enhance customer citizenship behavior.