Research On The Influence Of Service Environment On Customer Territorial Behavior

With the continuous increase of China’s population,crowding has become the normal state of the service environment.In a crowded environment,customers will feel that their freedom is threatened,and their service resources are limited,so they will make a behavior based on the maintenance of territory.The research on territorial behavior has expanded from the field of organizational behavior to the field of marketing.Service environment is an important link for consumers to measure service quality.Some scholars have made meaningful literature reviews on the research related to territorial behavior,and it seems that starting from the organizational field has become the mainstream research of scholars,while few have been involved in the field of service marketing.Therefore,it is necessary to study the impact of service environment congestion on customer territory behavior,which provides effective suggestions for enterprises to provide customers with more satisfactory services and reduce customer territory conflict in a crowded environment.This study use the theory of confrontation to discuss the the influence mechanism of service environment(taking environmental crowding as an example)on customer territory behavior.Using the stimulus-organism-response model,this study constructs a research framework between environmental crowding,lack of perceptual control,customer territory behavior,environmental order,and privacy concern,puts forward research assumptions,and designs a customer territory behavior scale.Through three formal experiments,SPSS 26.0 software was used to analyze the data and the following conclusions were drawn:(1)Service environment congestion will significantly affect customer territory behavior.In a crowded service environment,consumers are more likely to show customer territory tendency.(2)The lack of perceived control plays a mediating role in the impact of service environment congestion on customer territory behavior,that is,when the service environment is crowded,customers perceive a strong lack of control over the environment,and then customer territory behavior tends to become stronger;(3)In the process of service environment congestion affecting the lack of customer perception control,service environment order plays a regulatory role,that is,when the service environment is crowded,compared with an orderly environment,customers in an unordered service environment feel less control over the environment.(4)Privacy concerns play a moderating role in the impact of service environment congestion on customer territory behavior,that is,customers with high privacy concerns tend to be more territorial in a crowded service environment.Finally,from the perspective of managers,this study puts forward several management suggestions from the five aspects:service environment setting,staff training,order management,behavior transformation and service distance.Additionally,limitations of the study are discussed,and several prospects for future research directions are proposed from four aspects: research scenarios,research methods,research perspectives and research scales.