Service Fairness and Its Effect on Customer Citizenship Behaviour in the Ghanaian Banking Industry: A Mediation and Moderation Analysis.

Abstract

Banks are a fundamental and integral part of economies all over the world. Their strategic roles as safe keepers of money and facilitators of trade and individual financial transactions makes them virtually indispensable. In the past decade, the banking and financial services sector of Ghana has experienced monumental growth along with major banking industry reforms and other extraneous incidents including government domestic debt exchange. All of these have conjoined in heightening the subject of fairness in the delivery of banking services. Service fairness in banking services delivery has been shown to be beneficial in ensuring satisfaction, loyalty, positive word of mouth and overall, a higher sense of confidence which is absolutely essential in enabling banking business thrive. This thesis seeks to offer theoretical and practical insights into service fairness in the banking industry by performing a mediation and moderation analysis using the key indices of customer commitment and duration of banking relationship and their consequential effects on customer engagements in various citizenship behaviours within the settings of an emerging economy - Ghana. The study is hinged on the justice theory, equity theory and social exchange theory in advancing a conceptual framework to empirically study as well as give clarity to the interconnections of these individual constructs. By its adoption of positivism as its worldview, the thesis chose to quantitatively as well as cross sectionally obtain data in a survey format from 602 bank customers in Ghana. Data obtained was analysed by the use of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The study finds that, while all the dimensions of service fairness namely: price fairness, procedural fairness, interpersonal fairness, informational fairness and outcome fairness were relevant only two namely: outcome fairness and interpersonal fairness have a direct effect on customer citizenship behaviour. Additionally, customer commitment came up as an important mediator (facilitator) how positively negatively related the dimensions of service fairness were to customer citizenship behaviour. Further, the duration of banking relationship moderated the relationship between procedural fairness and customer commitment, procedural fairness and customer citizenship behaviour (CCB), interpersonal fairness and CCB, price fairness and CCB, outcome fairness and customer commitment as well as customer commitment and CCB. These findings highlight the importance of service fairness in banking services delivery but also reveals the criticality of customer commitment in instigating CCB, as the service fairness dimensions of price fairness, informational fairness and procedural fairness were found not to have a direct effect on CCB. Findings also point to customers specific engagement advocacy and feedback behaviours as the other CCB dimensions of tolerance and helping were found to be insignificant. Additionally, the consequential effects this thesis holds for practice and theory forms part of the discussions in this thesis.