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Marketing Letters

, Volume 17, Issue 1, pp 31–46 | Cite as

The effects of relationship quality on customer retaliation

  • Yany GrégoireEmail author
  • Robert J. Fisher
Article

Abstract

This research examines the effects of relationship quality (RQ) on customers' desires to retaliate after service failures. We posit that the effects of RQ are contingent upon the attributions customers make about the firm’s controllability over a service failure. Two competing hypotheses are examined and reconciled. The “love is blind” hypothesis posits that when low controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a lesser desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. On the other hand, the “love becomes hate” hypothesis specifies that when high controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a greater desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. The hypotheses are tested with a survey-based design and a partial least squares (PLS) model that incorporates a multiplicative latent construct.

Keywords

Retaliation Relationship quality Controllability Service failure SEM PLS Complaint behaviors 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of MarketingWashington State UniversityPullmanUSA
  2. 2.Nabisco Professor of Marketing, Richard Ivey School of BusinessUniversity of Western OntarioLondonCanada

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