Measuring Affective & Calculative Commitment
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Sep 28, 2009
In my recent post, Your Half-Human, Half-Vulcan Customers, I discussed affective commitment (the emotional pleasure your customer takes in doing business with you: the Human half) and calculative commitment (the cold-blooded evaluation that governs why your customer has a business relationship with you: the Vulcan half). After reading that post, the logical question for you to ask is how to measure your customers' affective and calculative commitment.
My past review of the literature hadn't shown much in the way of consensus, though I did find two papers using the following measures:
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means "strongly disagree" and 10 means "strongly agree", please indicate your level of agreement or disagreement with each of the following about your telecommunications provider.
[Affective Commitment]
1. I take pleasure in being a customer of the company.
2. The company is the operator that takes the best care of their customers.
3. There is a presence of reciprocity in my relationship with the company.
4. I have feelings of trust toward the company.
[Calculative Commitment]
5. It pays off economically to be a customer of the company.
6. I would suffer economically if the relationship were broken.
7. The company has location advantages versus other companies.
Source: Anders Gustafsson, Michael D. Johnson, & Inger Roos, "The Effects of Customer Satisfaction, Relationship Commitment Dimensions, and Triggers on Customer Retention".
Sadly, there's a lot to dislike about this measurement, as it doesn't reflect modern rating scale best practices: it uses a 10-point bipolar scale rather than a 7-point bipolar scale, it uses numbers rather than labels, it's a Likert scale and subject to acquiescence response bias, and it has some complex items (e.g., "There is a presence of reciprocity in my relationship with the company").
Despite those weaknesses, I have used it with minor modification in some of my research (changing #2 to "[vendor] is the company that takes the best care of their customers" and changing #7 to "The company has advantages versus other companies"). I'm continuing to experiment: for B2B and more expensive consumer goods (e.g., appliances and cars), calculative commitment is an important predictor of loyalty (i.e., repurchase likelihood); for inexpensive consumer goods, affective commitment is more important for its impact on loyalty.
If your customers are "Human" (driven by emotion), consider adding the affective commitment index to your research. If your customers are "Vulcan" (driven by logic), consider adding the calculative commitment index. And if your customers are half-Human, half-Vulcan, use both measures. And never let them try to pinch you on the neck!