Self-congruity and switching intention among Malaysian hotel customers

Abstract

Understanding consumers’ switching intention is crucial due to the reason that it may affect service companies’ performance. Indeed keeping the current customer base is cheaper than gaining new customers. As such, it is crucial to understand what affects customers’ switching intention before it creates serious threat to the firms. Furthermore, it can act as an opportunity for the firms to understand their shortcomings, to develop their present marketing strategies, and to take corrective actions. Few studies have pointed that customer dissatisfaction, service failure, perceived justice, and cultural barriers as the antecedents of customer complaint attitude. However, there is a dearth of research that has examined customers’ psychological aspects as the determinants of such negative attitude towards the service provider. The present study is such an effort to address this gap. Considering this, this study aims to shed some light on customer switching intention based on psychological aspects particularly focusing on self-congruity and its dimensions as the antecedents in the context of Malaysian hotel industry. On the whole, the objective of this study is to examine the direct effect of four dimensions of self-congruity on customers’ switching intention. Data were collected by using survey questionnaires which were distributed to customers of seven Five Star hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 212 completed usable questionnaires were obtained. The data were analyzed using statistical package for social science (SPSS) version 20. Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression analyses were used to test the research hypotheses. Results reveal that actual self-congruity, social self-congruity and ideal social self-congruity negatively and significantly affect customers’ switching intention. However, data did not support the relationship between ideal self-congruity and customer switching intention. In overall, the results emphasize the significant effect of study variables in decreasing hotel customers’ switching intention. It is expected that the result from this study contributes significantly in the field of consumer behaviour literature as well as to the hotel industry practitioners and policy makers.