How commitment both enables and undermines marketing relationships

Abstract Purpose – The relationship marketing literature puts forward that customer commitment is central to the development of marketing relationships. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which two components of customer commitment (affective commitment and continuance commitment) both enhance and undermine customer loyalty. Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical model was developed to determine the extent to which the components of commitment both served as mediators of and interacted with one another in the relationship between service quality and switching and advocacy intentions. This model was examined in a survey of customers in three service settings; financial services, retail‐grocery services and telecommunications services. Findings – Commitment serves as a partial mediator of the service quality‐loyalty relationship. It was also found that affective commitment made a negative impact on switching intentions and a positive impact on advocacy intentions in all three service settings. Continuance commitment had mixed effects on switching intentions and made a negative impact on advocacy intentions.. At the same time there was an interactive effect between the two components of commitment such that continuance commitment depressed the positive effects of affective commitment on both dependent variables. Originality/value – While the positive impact of identification based affective commitment is well understood in the marketing literature, the role of continuance commitment is not so well appreciated. This study reinforces the weakness of a relationship based on continuance commitment. In addition, few studies prior to this one have demonstrated the interactive effects between the two components of commitment.