The Effect of Trust and Commitment on Retention of High-Risk Professional Service Customers

The Impact of Perceived Closeness on the Differing Roles of Satisfaction, Trust, Commitment, and Comfort on Intention to Remain with a Physician

“…This study extends previous work by Crutchfield (2001) that suggests that as patient-doctor relationships mature ''the customer is more likely to overlook or justify violations of trust and will remain in the relationship'' (p. 23). In the Crutchfield study, commitment was found to enhance retention when trust was questioned.…”

“…The Intention to Remain with a Physician 3 trust-commitment link has been shown to play a critical role in relationship development (Morgan and Hunt 1994), while satisfaction, trust and commitment have all been shown to impact the customer's intention to remain (Oliver and Swan 1989;Garbarino and Johnson 1999). These associations have been previously explored in healthcare settings, and have been shown to have an impact on patient retention (Crutchfield 2001;Taylor and Baker 1994). Consistent with prior research, we propose the following: H1: Trust in the physician will have a positive impact on patient retention.…”

“…While research focused on medical practitioners in specialty areas indicates patient satisfaction continues to be important in the selection of physicians and hospitals (Crutchfield, Eveland, and Eveland 2002;Peltier, Schibrowsky, and Cochran 2002;Wheatley 1997) and as an influence on outcome-based measures such as future purchase intentions (Baker and Taylor 1997), it is not the only factor determining patient loyalty over time (Crutchfield 2001). The doctor-patient relationship is also critical in the overall evaluation of healthcare services (Peltier, Schibrowsky, and Cochran 2002;Yucelt 1994).…”

“…Further, relationship duration as a relationship strength indicator is problematic (Barnes 1997) because it will always be confounded with the age of the individual (Berscheid, Snyder, and Omoto 1989) and may not accurately represent the customer's intention to remain. For these reasons, perceived closeness was chosen as a variable of interest since satisfaction, trust and commitment have been shown to have differing roles among high and low relationship customers in an experiential service setting (Garbarino and Johnson 1999) and it has been proposed that dual strategies for retaining high and low relationship patients may be warranted in healthcare (Crutchfield 2001). Based on this research, the following hypothesis is proposed: H5: The level of closeness felt toward the physician will moderate patient retention such that those variables that significantly influence intention to remain in a low closeness setting will differ from those that influence intention to remain in a high closeness setting.…”

“…Further, the study attempts to reconcile contradictory findings in the literature on the satisfaction-intention to remain linkage by testing the moderating influence of perceived closeness to the healthcare provider as a possible explanation. In particular, a healthcare setting was chosen since the patient-doctor relationship has been previously explored with regard to trust, commitment, and satisfaction and the impact of each on patient retention (Baker and Taylor 1997;Crutchfield, Eveland, and Eveland 2002) and calls for research testing competing models with high and low relationship patients have been made (Crutchfield 2001). While closeness has been examined by service researchers (Barnes 1998) in terms of it being a key measure of the customer's view of the relationship, it has not been examined as a moderator of relational outcome variables.…”