Collectivism, Individualism and In-Group Membership: Implications for Consumer Complaining Behaviors in Multicultural Contexts

Effective implementation of a customer relationship management strategy rests on understanding and managing customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction and complaining behavior processes. However, the extensive consumer complaining behavior (CCB) literature that has emerged since the 1970s has focused almost exclusively on U.S. consumres, and the few CCB studies conducted outside of the United States have suffered from a lack of integrating theory of how culture influences CCB. This paper builds from the cultural psychology and CCB literatures to contrast individualist and collectivist cultural patterns and to argue that a consumer's behavioral responses to post-purchase dissatisfaction will be strongly influenced by this aspect of their cultural identity. Working models of voice, exit and negative word-of-mouth complaining behaviors are offered which can test the impacts of this dimension of culturre on CCB. A number of propositions are derived from the models, and their implications for management are discussed.