Not Just Good, but Fair Service: The Mediating Role of Psychological Contract Breach between Service Quality and Behavioral Outcomes

ABSTRACT

Understanding tourist expectations is vital for hospitality and tourism businesses to prepare for a psychological contract breach. Prior research has widely evidenced the roles of psychological contract breach predominantly between the company (i.e., organization) and employee (i.e., service provider). Nevertheless, the psychological contract between the service provider and the customer/consumer (service receiver) (e.g., tourist) has been neglected. Therefore, the current study presents how the psychological contract breach of perceived service quality of tourists influences their satisfaction and positive word of mouth. The current study further tests the boundary conditions (i.e., moderation), roles of travel purpose and the number of hotels’ stars. The study used a survey method for tourists visiting Macao. The results (n = 253) indicate that psychological contract breach mediated the relationship between perceived service quality, visitor satisfaction and positive word of mouth. Further, drawing upon the social information-seeking behavior as a baseline, the study results show that leisure tourists tend to be more sensitive to their psychological contract breach perception than non-leisure tourists.

不仅好, 而且服务公平: 心理契约违反在服务质量和行为结果之间的中介作用摘要

了解游客的期望对于酒店和旅游企业为心理契约违约做准备至关重要。先前的研究已广泛证明了心理契约违约的作用主要在公司(即组织)和员工(即服务提供者)之间。然而, 服务提供者与客户/消费者(例如游客)之间的心理契约却被忽视了。因此, 本研究提出了游客感知服务质量的心理契约违约如何影响他们的满意度和口碑, 并进一步测试了旅行目的和酒店星级的中介作用。本研究对访澳游客进行调查。结果 (n = 253) 说明心理契约违反在感知服务质量、访客满意度和积极口碑之间的关系中起中介作用。此外, 以社会信息寻求行为为基准, 研究结果亦指出休闲游客对心理契约违约的感知往往比非休闲游客更敏感。

KEYWORDS:

• Service quality
• psychological contract breach
• tourist satisfaction
• positive word of mouth
• travel purpose
• tourist behavior

关键词:

• 服务质量
• 心理契约违约
• 游客满意度
• 正面口碑
• 旅游目的
• 游客行为

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Macao Institute for Tourism Studies: Instituto de Formacao Turistica de Macau [333/EST /2016]; Macao Institute for Tourism Studies [333/EST /2016].