The Antecedents and Outcomes of Micro-Enterprise Business Banking Customers’ Relationship Satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Purpose

The paper uses an ongoing business-to-business (B2B) relationship perspective to establish the interrelationships between trust, commitment, and relationship satisfaction (as relational constructs) and specific assets, formalization, and opportunism (as transaction cost variables) from a buyer’s perspective, framed within micro-enterprises in the business banking industry in South Africa.

Methodology/Approach

Data were collected via self-administered online questionnaires from 381 micro-enterprise customers of one of South Africa’s major banks. We first used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess the measurement model before structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to estimate the hypothesized relationships between the study constructs. The measurement and structural models fitted the data well. The research was approached using the dual theoretical lenses of relationship marketing and transaction cost theory to investigate relationship satisfaction from a buyer’s perspective.

Findings

The results support the notion that, in a B2B context, relationship satisfaction is an outcome of trust and commitment, with commitment being the stronger predictor. Relationship satisfaction, in turn, was positively related to both specific assets and formalization (the relationship with formalization being the strongest), and a negative relationship between relationship satisfaction and opportunism.

Practical implications

Since our results found commitment to be a stronger predictor of relationship satisfaction than trust (contrary to much previous research that found the opposite to be true), the paper concludes with several commitment-related suggestions for banks.

Contribution

Although much research exists on trust, commitment, and satisfaction, to our knowledge this study is the first using dual theoretical lenses (relationship marketing and transaction cost theory) to investigate relationship satisfaction from a buyer’s perspective among micro-enterprise customers in a banking context. The insights gained from our study therefore not only address this under-researched area (micro-enterprises), but also contribute toward expanding our understanding of forming (and maintaining) banking relationships with the customers of the smallest-sized businesses.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• commitment
• relationship satisfaction
• micro-enterprises
• banking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data are stored on university servers; DOI is not available.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.