Examining The Association Between Perceived Psychological Power And Consumer Complaint Intention

From the perspective of sellers and providers complaint is more desirable than silent leaving or spreading negative word of mouth or even silent loyalty.The direct complaint provides organisations not only with an opportunity to detect a problem and give better service in the future but it also gives a chance to win back a dissatisfied consumer who decided to deliver his or her negative experience to those who caused it.Unfortunately not all dissatisfied consumers complain.We argue that one of the possible reasons for such inaction is a lack of perceived power.Our research is mainly devoted to the topic of consumer complaining behaviour among consumers with the different level of power.Especially,we are interested in how the psychological sense of power influences consumers complaining behaviour after product or service failure.Our research was attempting to show that powerful individuals in comparison with powerless counterparts are more likely to employ their consumer rights through voicing their dissatisfaction to the offender.We assert that trait-based power,incidental power,and activated power can all lead to the increased complaint intention after experiencing product or service failures.We have also tried to explain the grounds for the relation between power and complaint intention by introducing several potential mediators in the first field study,however mediating variables need further confirmation in an experimental study.For Study 1 we collected 171 valid responses,which were represented by the population with different job positions and different level of income.For measuring consumer complaint behavior we employed hypothetical scenario about negative online purchase experience and adapted different scales which reflect consumer complaint behavior such as complaint intention,negative word-of-mouth intention,and online negative review intention.In addition,we measured personal sense of power of consumers and their perceived success of compliant,perceived cost of complaint,and desire to distance oneself from a problem.Our findings have shown that consumers with higher perceived power are more likely to be engaged in complaint behavior.Possible explanations could be their higher level of perceived success of complaint,low level of perceived cost of complaint and low level of distancing.Moreover,income was found as a moderator in the relationship between power and complaint intention.For Study 2 we gathered 121 valid responses represented by students population.The hypothetical scenario was about core service failure at a restaurant.Power was measured as an incidental state.Power was found positively correlated with complaint intention.For experimental Study 3 we asked 61 participants(MBA students)to recall a powerful or powerless experience from their life and response to the same survey as in Study 2.After keeping the level of dissatisfaction constant the effect of power become prominent.Those in high power group were found to be more likely to proceed with complaint actions.Our findings have suggested the idea that power can be treated as one of those variable that can explain why some individuals stay silent after experiencing dissatisfaction.In addition,we can conclude that increasing of perceived psychological power of consumers could be very beneficial for business owners as it can encourage consumers to voice their negative experience.Talking about our research contributions,this work provides consumer complaint behaviour with a new predictor and enriches power literature with a new positive angle of considering power.