| The purpose of this research was to develop a more robust model to examine customer voluntary performance behaviors in the context of the lodging industry. In this study, a structural model was presented that proposed positive relationships among overall customer satisfaction, trust, and commitment, and further suggested positive relationships between three social exchange antecedents (overall customer satisfaction, trust, and commitment) and three customer voluntary performance behaviors (loyalty, cooperation, and participation) in the lodging industry. Finally, the research also empirically tested the goodness-of-fit of the proposed structural model for lodging frequent guest program (FGP) and non-frequent guest program (NFGP) customers.; The model was analyzed using LISREL for a sample of lodging travelers. Based on a series of tests, the results were as follows: Overall customer satisfaction was significantly, positively related to trust and commitment, respectively. However, there was a non-significant relationship between trust and commitment.; Overall customer satisfaction was significantly, positively related to loyalty and cooperation, respectively. However, for FGP travelers, there was no significant relationship between overall customer satisfaction and cooperation. The direct relationship from overall customer satisfaction to participation was not supported. The influence of trust on loyalty, cooperation, and participation was non-significant. However, for NFGP travelers, the positive relationship from trust to cooperation was supported. Commitment was significantly, positively related to loyalty, cooperation, and participation.; FGP and NFGP groups were invariant in configuration, metric (λ), gamma (γ) estimates, beta (β) estimates, and factor variance and covariance (Φ,Ψ). The FGP and NFGP structure models had similar paths. The causal relationships between social exchange antecedents and customer voluntary performance behavior were very similar between FGP and NFGP groups. However, the FGP travelers had stronger performances for customer loyalty and participation than did NFGP travelers.; Hospitality managers should determine how to develop customer commitment because, in this study, customer commitment had more important contributions than overall customer satisfaction and trust to inspire customer loyalty, cooperation, and participation. However, there were many other antecedents that might impact customer voluntary performance behaviors. Including these prospective antecedents in the model could change the path analyses. Meanwhile, there were some potential confounding variables that might have affected the self-report attitudes of individual guest in evaluating the hotel performances and could make findings of the causal model different. This study did not control for these potential confounding variables except membership. Thus, more future research is required. |
