Environmental Consciousness and Relation Quality in Islamic Business: Impact on Firm Performance

This mixed method study aims to compare the effect of EC and RQ on customer attitude in Islamic context in three stages. In first and second stages, The Islamic environment consciousness (IEC) and Islamic Relationship Quality (IRQ) were operantionalized based on the grounded theory. In third stage, the impact of IEC and IRQ on consumer attitude were examined using a quasi-experimental design. The findings from the first two stages indicated that IRQ comprised three components and twelve constituent subcomponents and that IEC included two components with seven constituent subcomponents. In the third phase of the study, the conjoint analysis technique was initially employed to select three scenarios from nine possible scenarios. Further, statistical analyses of the research data revealed significant effects of IEC and IRQ on consumer attitude: significantly more positive consumer attitudes were found in firms with higher IEC and higher IRQ compared to firms with lower or no IEC and IRQ. It was also found that the two public relation tools were not significantly different from the consumer perspective. The study is significant because it operationalized IEC and IRQ and offers implications for academicians and managers who intend to investigate their business relationship performance in terms of such Islamic context-specific constructs. Moreover, the innovative use of scenarios in measuring the consumers’ attitudes offers upstream research as an alternative to downstream studies of EC which render redundant information about environmental behavior of companies.