A study on improving employees’ behaviour towards increasing students’ loyalty: the mediating role of need understanding, service quality, and intimacy among students in Kenya

During the past few years, there have been various studies on the relationship between academic behavior, teaching and student retention but not much has been on administration staff and students.This study examined improving employees' behavioural factors towards increasing students' loyalty.The paper explores the direct mediation and indirect mediation of employee behavioural factors leading to build student loyalty.More specifically the focus is on the constructs of service quality (SQLTY), need understanding (NEEDUND), intimacy (INTIMACY), and student loyalty (STLOY).This study depended on a positivist research paradigm.In this study, over 800 structured questionnaires were administered for research subjects.However, 743 were captured for the final analysis.The analytical tool used in this study is the ADANCO 2.0.1 software and in terms of statistical processing, the PLS-SEM technique was utilized.The two main takeaways from the direct relationships are that INTIMACY is a strong predictor of STLOY, and NEEDUND is also a strong predictor of SQLTY.The indirect mediations of INTIMACY on SQLTY and STLOY, IN-TIMACY on NEEDUND and STLOY, and SQLTY on NEEDUND and INTIMACY were all not supported.The study, like any academic work, has limitations.Despite these limitations, this study offers theoretical as well as practical values for the research community and administrators of universities and higher education administrators as a whole.For administrators of the universities and the higher education, the study points out the critical needs for administrators to better understand students' loyalty and behaviours of employees during the service encounter, which could lead to intimacy and eventually student loyalty.The present study is innovated by quantitatively examining how the above-mentioned behavioural factors of employees could lead to INTIMACY and STLOY.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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