Understanding the Relationships Between Commitment and Voice: Hypotheses, Empirical Evidence, and Directions for Future Research

This study aims to explicate why customers stay in service relationships, while additionally examining how different forms of commitment to these relationships affect customers' voice, both within and outside of the relationship. Based on qualitative interviews and an extensive literature review, we provide and test a framework linking staying reasons to commitment to voice utilizing a survey of 685 online panelists in committed service relationships. Our results illustrate the differential effects of staying reasons on commitment and commitment on voice. Social balance theory, social influence theory, and escalation of commitment provide important theoretical bases for why individuals stay. We examine a number of unexamined or underexplored gaps in the literature, finding seven notable links relative to staying reasons and commitment (relational benefits and resistance to change to calculative commitment; subjective norms and sunk costs to affective commitment; procedural switching costs, avoidance of conflict, and resistance to change to normative commitment). Additionally, a number of less explored, as well as previously studied, findings between commitments and voice are noted, including the strong negative impacts of calculative commitment and silent endurance on voice. This suggests the importance of the service provider not locking the customer in too tightly.