Antecedents and consequences of consumer motivation in patronizing wasiyyah services in Malaysia

Abstract

Motivation plays a significant role in explaining consumer behaviour and consumer decision making. This study investigates consumer motivation in patronizing wasiyyah services in Malaysia. Wasiyyah has been regarded as one of the remedies for frozen asset problems in the country. However, despite its importance, the penetration rate of wasiyyah services in Malaysia remains low. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between the basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness, spirituality) as the antecedents of consumers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the consequence of those motivations on satisfaction. The roles of the motivations as the mediators between basic psychological needs and satisfaction are also investigated. The research framework consists of 18 hypotheses that predict ten direct relationships and eight mediation effects. The model integrates the basic psychological needs theory (BPNT) and cognitive evaluation theory (CET) in which self-determination theory (SDT) is the over-arching theory integrating the two theories to explain the relationships. This study focuses on Malaysian Muslims consumers who have already patronized wasiyyah services. The data was collected using online survey and 182 valid data was involved in testing the research model. SPSS 25 and SmartPLS 3.0 were used for data analysis. The empirical results of this study reveal that autonomy, relatedness, and spirituality influence consumers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation significantly; while competence is only significant for intrinsic motivation. The findings also revealed that extrinsic motivation influences satisfaction significantly while intrinsic motivation does not. Thus, the indirect effects show that only extrinsic motivation mediates the relationships between autonomy, relatedness, spirituality, and satisfaction. The study results substantiate basic psychological needs influence on consumers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in patronizing wasiyyah services in Malaysia. More importantly, the significant role of extrinsic motivation on satisfaction offers insights for industry players to strengthen and create sustainable marketing strategies to attract more Muslim consumers to patronize the wasiyyah service which may eventually help to overcome the frozen assets problems.