Is everything to your satisfaction? The impact of a liberal redress policy on illegitimate complaining behavior, from the perspective of neutralization theory.

Abstract

During the last decade it has become accepted practice to pro-actively encourage and welcome customer complaints, by offering liberal redress policies. However, a small portion of academic literature acknowledges that customers do sometimes engage in illegitimate complaining behavior probably fueled by these policies. Moreover, it is also expected that customers are more prone to claim in an illegitimate manner, when transacting with large firms. However, it remains peculiar that people engage in such behaviors as they are in essence illegal and therefore induce an extremely unpleasant state of mind. A possible explanation can be given from the perspective of neutralization theory, which states that individuals employ certain cognitive techniques to convince themselves of the appropriateness of their actions. The objective of this study, therefore, was to find out to what extent the firm-centric drivers; ‘liberal redress policy’ and ‘firm size’ enhance illegitimate complaining behavior and whether the use of neutralization techniques is a possible underlying mechanism which explains the behavior. In order to answer the research questions a 2x2, online, scenario-based, between-subjects, posttest-only experiment was executed.