Cognitive And Affective Trust In Service Relations

6150 Words25 Pages
Journal of Business Research 58 (2005) 500 – 507 Cognitive and affective trust in service relationships Devon Johnsona,*, Kent Graysonb a Goizueta Business School, Emory University, 1300 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30322-2710, USA b Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, USA Abstract Social psychologists conceptualize trust in a manner that differs from conceptualizations used by marketing researchers to date. Building from the social psychology literature, we posit that interpersonal trust in consumer-level service relationships has cognitive and affective dimensions. We examine the relative impact of service provider expertise, product performance, firm reputation, satisfaction, and similarity in influencing customer’s perception of these dimensions of trust in a service provider. Using survey data from 349 customers of a firm of financial advisers in the United Kingdom, our results show that cognitive and affective dimensions of trust can be empirically distinguished and have both common and unique antecedents. The results also provide further clarification concerning the relationship between trust and sales effectiveness. D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cognitive dimensions; Affective dimensions; Behavioral dimensions; Service relationships; Trust; Financial services 1. Introduction Ever-increasing database management capabilities now allow companies to focus on mass-customization rather than mass marketing, share of customer rather than share of markets, and customer retention rather than customer recruitment (Peppers and Rogers, 1993). The objective is to ‘‘own’’ the customer by building high-trust relationships within which an increasing array of products and services can be sold. Although these developments have yielded significant benefits, they are falling short of achieving a ‘‘relationship’’ with the

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