Analyzing the Issue of Respect and Trust: Determining the Mediating Role of Religion

One way of developing competitive advantage among customers is to establish trust in their everyday dealings. Extant of literature has discussed various factors affecting trust but none has touched on the dimensions and effect of respect towards customers’ trust. In order to improve the service operationalization, this paper is committed to provide theoretical and empirical support that calculative ways of respecting customers should be included as way to develop trust among customers. Apart from that, this study also includes the issue of religion to further determine customer preferences towards the service provider, if they believe in different religion. The survey of this study is conducted on 459 customers in service sectors in Malaysia. The obtained data from the questionnaires are analyzed through the SPSS statistical packaged software. Analyses of results revealed that all dimensions of respect (attention to particularity, understanding, responsible and authority) significantly correlated to trust and to a certain extent religion mediates the whole relationship.