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Journal of Management and Business Research, 2008
25（ 2 ）：195-220
DOI： 10.6504/JOM.2008.25.02.04 |
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| Development and Validation of a Retailer Commitment Scale |
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Although the researches regarding commitment have been accumulated abundant research results, regarding the components of commitment, researchers still do not have congruent viewpoints. Commitment is a complex construct, but what most researchers explored belongs to be attitudinal aspects and fewer studies explored behavioral aspects. Even for the studies of attitudinal commitment, those results are not mature, because what components of attitudinal commitment should be included also has no conclusions. After arranging past literature about the definitions of commitment, this study finds commitment should include the motive component, also include the intentioned component, and even include the behavioral component. Accordingly, this study recognizes commitment as continuing the valued long-term relationship and from the motive, intentioned, behavioral views, explores the components of commitment.
Through comprehensively exploring the components of commitment, this study further constructs a more comprehensive retailer commitment scale. The constructing steps of retailer commitment scale are mainly based on the paradigm of marketing scale development which Churchill (1979) and Gerbing and Anderson (1988) advocated. This paradigm is not only simple but also clear and is widely accepted by researchers.
Research methods include qualitative and quantitative analysis. In qualitative aspect, this study deeply interviews retailers and the results are used to make content analysis. The generations of scale items come partly from content analysis and partly from literature. In quantitative aspect, this study adopts the questionnaire survey to collect the empirical data. The methods of statistic analysis adopt exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability analysis.
The major contributions of this study are to clear the concept of retailer commitment, to integrate diverse commitment classification in the past studies, to comprehensively indicate the multi-components of commitment and the relationships among components, to establish the model of commitment, and to construct retailer commitment scales of various types which can be provided to subsequent research uses, including affective commitment, normative commitment, instrumental commitment, intentioned commitment, and behavioral commitment. |
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| retailer, commitment, scale |
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