The impact of personality and self-efficacy on customer revenge behaviour

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.Betrayed customers are increasingly seeking ways to restore fairness. One way to do this is through customer revenge. Customer revenge behaviour has become an increasingly important topic in marketing research, especially with the far reaching impact that online complaining (a form of indirect revenge) has. Revenge behaviour usually takes place after a service failure and a failed attempt at service recovery, and is an attempt to redress an interpersonal offence by committing an aggressive action against a perceived offender. This is done to 1) get even with the company, 2) restore a moral balance, or 3) is sometimes justified by customers as a moral obligation to restore the balance between the customer and the firm. There are two forms of revenge behaviour: direct and indirect revenge. Direct revenge consists of marketplace aggression and vindictive complaining, and indirect revenge consists of negative word-of-mouth and online complaints. This study expands and tests a comprehensive model of customer revenge behaviour (adapted from Gregoire, Laufer & Tripp, 2010) within a service environment. Revenge behaviour is usually an attempt to redress an interpersonal offence by committing an aggressive action against a perceived offender (Bechwati & Morrin, 2003; McCullough et al., 2001; Zourrig et al., 2009). Previous models of customer revenge behaviour assumes that all customers go through certain phases towards a desire for revenge and then, possibly, actual revenge behaviour. This study attempts to show that some customers are more likely to enact revenge than others. First, the key role that customers’ personality type plays in the development of a desire for revenge is investigated. Personality type can be described as a combination of characteristics that makes up an individuals’ character (McCullough et al., 2001). Two personality types (derived from the Big Five personality types) that are hypothesised as being more inclined to developing a desire for revenge: agreeableness and conscientiousness, where customers who have low levels of agreeableness and low levels of conscientiousness are more inclined to develop a desire for revenge