A research on the effect of service firms' psychological contract violation on customers' behavior: Satisfaction as mediator

This paper replaces the relationship between the violation of organizational psychological contract and employees with the relationship between the violation of psychological contract and customers in the context of marketing. Through a quantitative research on 236 customers who have travelled before and structural equation verification, and found, there exist a kind of psychological contract between service firms and customers similar to that between organizations and employees, constituted by a two-dimensional structure which involves transactional psychological contract and relational psychological contract. In the relationship between service firms' violation of psychological contract and customers' ECLS behavior, customers' degree of satisfaction plays a partly intermediary role. We also found out that the violation of transactional psychological contract directly results in customers' quitting using the service, increasing complaints and customers' decreasing loyalty and silent reaction, and indirectly causing the decline of customers' degree of satisfaction. At the same time, the violation of relational psychological contract only brings about influence on customers' loyalty.