ABSTRACT

Understanding tourist expectations is vital for hospitality and tourism businesses to prepare for a psychological contract breach. Prior research has widely evidenced the roles of psychological contract breach predominantly between the company (i.e., organization) and employee (i.e., service provider). Nevertheless, the psychological contract between the service provider and the customer/consumer (service receiver) (e.g., tourist) has been neglected. Therefore, the current study presents how the psychological contract breach of perceived service quality of tourists influences their satisfaction and positive word of mouth. The current study further tests the boundary conditions (i.e., moderation), roles of travel purpose and the number of hotels’ stars. The study used a survey method for tourists visiting Macao. The results (n = 253) indicate that psychological contract breach mediated the relationship between perceived service quality, visitor satisfaction and positive word of mouth. Further, drawing upon the social information-seeking behavior as a baseline, the study results show that leisure tourists tend to be more sensitive to their psychological contract breach perception than non-leisure tourists.

摘要

了解游客的期望对于酒店和旅游企业为心理契约违约做好准备至关重要。先前的研究已广泛证明心理契约违约的作用主要发生在公司（即组织）和员工（即服务提供商）之间。然而，服务提供者和顾客/消费者（服务接受者）（例如游客）之间的心理契约却被忽视了。因此，本研究提出了游客感知服务质量的心理契约违背如何影响他们的满意度和积极口碑。本研究进一步测试了边界条件（即适度）、旅行目的的作用和酒店星级的数量。该研究采用了对访澳游客进行调查的方法。结果 (n = 253) 表明，心理契约违背在感知服务质量、访客满意度和积极口碑之间的关系中起到中介作用。此外，以社会信息寻求行为为基线，研究结果表明，休闲游客往往比非休闲游客对其心理契约违反感知更为敏感。