Developing a framework for studying and evaluating the types of psychological contracts in the context of relationship marketing

Abstract

Nowadays, belief in the criteria and conditions of interactions with an organization to promote customer relationships is somehow tied to the organizational performance, and its final goal is of great importance. In the literature on organizational behavior, this belief is defined as the “psychological contract". The intention of this mixed research is to identify and discover the contents of psychological contracts within “relationship marketing" between customers and banks. In the first phase, qualitative research with a phenomenological approach was applied to study customers' experiences about psychological contracts. In this phase, the psychological contracts within relationship marketing were assessed through a questionnaire. Next, the data from the questionnaires were “factor analyzed" by Lisrel. We noted a fundamental understanding of the types of psychological contracts in the context of a relationship between a bank and its customers. Marketing policies with regard to the terms extracted from a certain kind of psychological contract in the study provided local and advanced results.