Measuring the mediating effect of customer trust - A case of corporate banking sector

Abstract

Understanding transformational leadership and relationship marketing is essential to exploit the future marketing strategies in the contemporary market environment, particularly in volatile and complex marketplace. This study attempts to explore and establish a link between these concepts through variables of transformational leadership; namely, intellectual stimulation and idealized influence with popular “trust-commitment” framework in relationship marketing. The corporate banking sector in Sri Lanka has been selected and one hundred salespersons were selected as a sample. It has been found that customer trust significantly mediates the relationship between the idealized influence behavior of a salesperson and customer commitment. Additionally customer trust significantly mediates the relationship between intellectual stimulation behavior of a salesperson and customer commitment .Thus the role of trust can be considered as important in the context of banking in bank-corporate client partnership strategy.