Evaluating Group Differences in Gender During the Formation of Relationship Quality and Loyalty in ISP Service - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 240

Figure 1.

Expertise

(F3)

H 2

H 3 H 7

Relational
Selling
Behavior

(F4)

H 1

Relationship
Quality

Loyalty (F1)

H 8

(F2)

H 4

Perceived
Network
Quality

(F5)

H 6

H 9

H 5

H 10

Service
Recovery

(F6)

Gender

quality. Gender moderates each path in the model.
While a similar work (Lin & Ding, 2005) puts
emphasis on the prior experience of Internet users
as a moderator, this study focuses on a different
moderator—gender.
Lin and Ding (2005) gave reviews for loyalty,
relationship quality and their antecedents, and
tested for the path significance. We will first sum-
marize their reviews and the relevant hypotheses,
and then introduce gender as a moderator.

trust between relaters and their satisfaction with
a relationship. In other words, relationship qual-
ity is regarded as a construct comprising at least
two components: (1) trust in a sales agent and
the service (Swan, Trawick, & Silva, 1985); and
(2) satisfaction with a sales agent and the service
(Crosby & Stephens, 1987).
Satisfaction is an emotional status that oc-
curs in response to an assessment of buyer-seller
interaction experiences (Westbrook, 1981). A
practicing business concept entails the pursuit
of customer satisfaction as the chief goal of any
organization. Not only can customer satisfac-
tion legitimately be an end in itself for business
organizations, but it is considered a means to
such ends as competitive advantages, customer
loyalty, and consequently survival (Gopalakrishna
& Mummalaneni, 1993).
Trust usually is considered necessary for
successful relationships (Berry, 1995; Moorman,
Deshpande, & Zaltman, 1993). From the existing
literature (Moorman et al., 1993), trust can be

relationship Quality

The relationship quality is a general evaluation
of relationship strength and the extent to which
a relationship meets the needs and expectations
of the parties involved, based on a history of
successful or unsuccessful encounters or events
(Crosby et al., 1990). Even though no consensus
exists concerning the constructs that form rela-
tionship quality (Kumar, Scheer, & Steenkamp,
1995), it often is conceptualized as involving