Understanding the Dimensions of Citizenship Behavior of Tourists (the Case of Cultural Heritage Tours in Iran)

Abstract

Although employee citizenship behavior has significant effect on quality of service delivery and consequently on creating superior tourist experience and competitive advantage for tourism businesses and destinations, but tourist citizenship behavior can facilitate reaching these goals, specifically through value co creation. In spite of that, most studies concentrate on employees’ citizenship behavior ignoring behaviors of travelers. Therefore, present study seeks to identify dimensions of tourist citizenship behavior of cultural heritage tourists traveling through tours. The statistical population of this study encompasses all inbound tourists who have visited Iran as cultural heritage tours. 384 people yield as a sample of population, through convenient sampling. To ensure the validity, the questionnaire was examined by experts and confirmed, similarly reliability via Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient. The data analysis was conducted in SPSS software via confirmatory factor analysis. Findings revealed 11 dimensions of tourist citizenship behavior including: cooperation, establishing peace and intimacy, sacrifice, patience and sympathy, active participation, support, recommendation, aid and assistance, establishing order, compensation and interpersonal interaction. Based on findings of current research, citizenship behavior in cultural and heritage tourism can enrich their experiences since fosters co creation of value and also active participation cultural heritage tourists, moving towards creative tourism. Tourism businesses and destinations managers should pave the way for expressing these behaviors, creating excellent experience for tourists in addition to co creation of value with them.

Keywords

• citizenship behavior
• tourist citizenship behavior
• cultural heritage tourism
• value co creation