The effects of customer socialization on customer behavior in social enterprises: role of organizational legitimacy in the eyes of customers
ISSN: 0025-1747
Article publication date: 19 September 2020
Issue publication date: 29 October 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how customer socialization strategies can help social enterprises (SEs) to establish different types of organizational legitimacy and how different types of organizational legitimacy in turn can encourage customers' positive in-role behavior (such as repurchasing) and extra-role citizenship behavior (such as referral, feedback and forgiveness of quality problems).
Design/methodology/approach
A survey of 381 customers in Chinese SEs is used to examine the research questions. The paper uses structural equation modeling and bootstrap method to analyze the hypothesized relationships among customer socialization strategies, organizational legitimacy and customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors.
Findings
This study finds that various customer socialization strategies can differentially enhance different types of organizational legitimacy of a SE, which in turn positively affects customers' in-role repeated purchase behavior and extra-role citizenship behavior. The study also finds that three types of organizational legitimacy are highly accumulative; gaining relational and market legitimacy might be a precondition for obtaining social legitimacy for SEs.
Originality/value
This study is one of the first to empirically investigate the important role of customer socialization strategies in the acquisition of different types of organizational legitimacy in the context of SEs. It also shows how different types of organizational legitimacy, in turn, can positively affect customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors. In addition, this is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the accumulative nature of three types of organizational legitimacy in SEs: relational legitimacy, market legitimacy and social legitimacy.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The papers form part of special section “Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Sharing Economy”, guest edited by Wenzhi Zheng, Jun Yang, Yenchun Jim Wu and Chunpei Lin.The authors are very grateful to the GE and all the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments through the preview process. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71772074 and No. 71772142).
Citation
Chen, X., He, Y., Wang, L. and Xiong, J. (2021), "The effects of customer socialization on customer behavior in social enterprises: role of organizational legitimacy in the eyes of customers", Management Decision, Vol. 59 No. 11, pp. 2713-2736. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-05-2019-0679
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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