The activities of misbehaving customers represent a significant problem for organizations across diverse sectors and industries. Customer misbehavior signifies behavior within the exchange setting that deliberately violates the generally accepted norms of conduct in such situations. The core aim of this study is to advance understanding of the antecedents to past customer misbehavior and examine the relationship between past misbehavior and future misbehavior intentions. Although prior studies offer insights into individual events or types of customer misbehavior, to date, empirical evidence of the antecedents to past misbehaviors and future behavioral intentions is lacking. Synthesizing literature from varied theoretical backgrounds, this study puts forth five personality-based variables (consumer alienation, Machiavellianism, sensation seeking, aggressiveness, and self-esteem) and four demographic variables (gender, income, age, and education) as antecedents to past customer misbehavior. In turn, this study reveals an association between past customer misbehavior and future misbehavior intent. Structural equation modeling procedures using a sample of 380 respondents reveals support for eight of the nine specified hypotheses. The article concludes with a discussion of the study's implications for theory and practice.
Consumers' deliberate acts of misbehavior are daily predicaments for firms across disparate sectors and industries (Fisk et al., 2010 and Fullerton and Punj, 2004). As a result, the long-standing cliché that the “customer is always right” is outdated, unrealistic, and naive (Reynolds and Harris, 2006). Given that the dysfunctional activities of customers represent a considerable financial, psychological, and physical cost to organizations, their personnel, and patrons (Harris and Reynolds, 2003), an understanding of the antecedents that drive such behaviors is imperative. The number of calls for empirical research on the broader study of the drivers of customer dysfunction mirrors this recognition (Al-Rafee and Cronan, 2006, Fisk et al., 2010 and Fullerton and Punj, 2004). However, empirical investigations of the antecedents of customer misbehavior are rare. Typically, such studies focus on examining antecedents to individual forms of misbehavior (see Grégoire et al., 2009 and Harris, 2008) or focus on the severity of a specific episode of customer deviance (see Reynolds and Harris, 2009).
Similarly, although past actions are good predictors of future behavior (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990), existing research neglects the association between previous acts of customer deviance and future customer misbehavior (Al-Rafee and Cronan, 2006, Babin and Griffin, 1995 and Harris, 2008). Although such studies provide insights into individual events or particular types of customer misbehavior, to date, self-report empirical evidence of the antecedents to past misbehaviors is limited, and research into the link between past engagement in misbehaviors and future misbehavior intent is lacking.
This study builds on extant research to develop, evaluate, and test a model of the antecedents to past customer misbehavior and future customer misbehavior intentions. By developing a conceptual model of the antecedents to past and future customer misbehavior, this study synthesizes extant research into a clear predictive framework. This study also makes an empirical contribution by identifying core personal and demographic factors that link to actual past behaviors. Such insights help facilitate the description of the link between actual past behaviors and future behavioral intentions. That is, the study's key aim is to address the identified research gap and examine the extent to which past customer misbehavior relates to future misbehavior intentions. Thus, in simultaneously examining the specified relationships, the research contributes to extant literature within this research field.
