The Effect of Participation in Production Ideation Crowdsourcing on Affective Commitment as a Driver of Customer Loyalty in the United States Lodging Industry

Authors

Clay DickinsonFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Business Administration

Major/Program

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First Advisor's Name

George Marakas

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Arijit Sengupta

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Roberto Rodriguez

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Hemang Subramanian

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

business

Date of Defense

6-7-2022

Abstract

Crowdsourcing and customer loyalty are two salient issues that offer tremendous opportunities and challenges in the U.S. lodging industry. Crowdsourcing has been empirically demonstrated to deliver substantial benefits at a reduced cost while retaining and enhancing the value of loyal customers has been the elusive “Holy Grail” of lodging companies for at least the past four decades. Moreover, the cost of today’s loyalty programs in the lodging industry is high and growing, while the true loyalty they ostensibly engender is dubious. Extant literature on crowdsourcing and customer loyalty suggests that the two constructs share a number of base theories and several psychological and other antecedents.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether lodging companies might be able to leverage these shared theories and antecedents to reap the benefits generated by crowdsourcing the ideation of new products and services while simultaneously enhancing customer loyalty in the process.

After analysis, the results show that shared psychological antecedents of self-esteem, social identity, and perceived knowledge, together with other incentives, significantly and positively affect customers’ willingness to participate in product ideation crowdsourcing, which in turn positively affects affective commitment as a mediating driver of customer loyalty. The analysis further shows that the effect that participation in product crowdsourcing has on affective commitment is moderated by the customers’ employment status, such that being a managerial level employee will amplify the positive effect on affective commitment while being a non-managerial employee will diminish that amplification.

The study results contribute to the existing theory and literature related to both crowdsourcing and customer loyalty, while the practical application of these results can have a prodigious impact on the lodging industry. Companies should be able to invite their customers to help them cost-effectively develop better products and services with the reasonable expectation that these participants will become even more loyal to the company. Moreover, this loyalty is psychological in nature, and as such is both lower cost and harder to break. Crowdsourced products have been empirically demonstrated to often not only be superior to those developed in-house but also to command a sales and marketing premium by merely letting consumers know that the product or service had, in fact, been the product of people like them.

Identifier

FIDC010727

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2346-6623

Recommended Citation

Dickinson, Clay, "The Effect of Participation in Production Ideation Crowdsourcing on Affective Commitment as a Driver of Customer Loyalty in the United States Lodging Industry" (2022). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 5070.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/5070