Effect of benefits and risks on customer's psychological ownership in the service industry

The authors investigate the antecedents of psychological ownership from the customers' perspective by applying employee psychological ownership (EPO) to human resource management.

The authors conducted questionnaires on utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits, perceived risk, customer satisfaction, customer trust and customers' psychological ownership (CPO) on 205 people. They verified their hypotheses using structural equation modeling analysis.

The authors found that customer trust positively influences CPO, but customer satisfaction does not. Instead, customer satisfaction indirectly affects CPO through the mediating effects of customer trust. They also found that utilitarian and hedonic benefits positively influence customer satisfaction and confidence, but perceived risk negatively influences it.

This study contributes to the service marketing literature by empirically confirming that customers have psychological ownership, such as employees, and by incorporating benefits, risk, trust and CPO into a comprehensive framework.

Marketers should formulate service strategies that strengthen customers' perceptions of utilitarian and hedonic benefits and avoid customers' perceived risk, which is expected to exert a significant CPO-enhancing effect.

In the service context, customers are perceived as partial employees. The authors empirically explored the role of perceived benefits and risks in enhancing CPO via customer satisfaction and trust by applying EPO concepts. Strengthening perceived benefits and avoiding perceived risk were verified as critical drivers of CPO in the service context. The results of this study confirm that customer trust is required for customers to feel CPO.