ABSTRACT
Theme parks feature different themes such as films and stories. They often socialize their patrons before they visit, which makes them an ideal context for exploring customer organizational socialization's influences. Considering the challenges theme parks face after the COVID-19, customer citizenship behavior, which is a kind of discretionary, spontaneous, and positive behavior towards the theme parks, is strongly suggested. This study aims to examine the relationship between customer organizational socialization and CCB towards organizations (CCB-O), employees (CCB-E), and other customers (CCB-C). Based on affective events theory, an integrated model is proposed with customer delight and affective commitment as the mediating factors. It is empirically tested on a sample of 413theme park visitors in Shanghai Disneyland and Ningbo Fantawild theme parks. Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) and bootstrapping methods through SPSS 25 and Mplus 8 are adopted as the key analytical techniques. The results reveal: (1) Customer organizational socialization positively influences all three targetbased CCB. It has the strongest total effect on CCB-O, and the weakest total effect on CCB-C. (2) Both customer delight and affective commitment play a mediating role in the relationship between customer organizational socialization and CCB. The affective commitment however is found to play a more critical role than customer delight. Specifically, customer delight does not mediate the effect of customer organizational socialization on CCB-E or CCB-C, while affective commitment mediates the relationships between customer organizational socialization and all three types of CCB. (3) Customer delight and affective commitment have different chain mediating effects between customer organizational socialization and different types of CCB. This study offers some theoretical contributions. First, this study enriched customer research by introducing theories from the organizational behavior field, and further highlighted customers' role as"partial employees". Second, this study explored the mechanism of customer organizational socialization on CCB at both emotional and attitudinal levels. The results in part challenged previous research that suggested customer delight is the core outcome of the theme park experience. Third, this study extended the application of affective events theory to customer research in the theme park context. The research findings are also insightful for theme park managers. First, various strategies can be taken to enhance customer organizational socialization. Successful theme parks always possess themes that have laid a good market foundation. Their visitors thereby absorb the knowledge before they visit the park, and are likely to do good things for the park. Second, ways to enhance customer delight and affective commitment, especially affective commitment, should be developed in theme parks, so that more CCB can be encouraged and help to alleviate the cost of running theme parks.