Governance Strategy for the Social Relationships Between Alumni and Their Alma Mater

Although prior studies in relationship marketing have greatly enhanced our understanding of alumni-university relationships, there has been considerably little empirical investigation of three managerial problems. The first problem is that while the economic benefits (e.g., profits or costs) of conventional business relationships receive much research attention, the noneconomic benefits or social benefits are not specifically studied (e.g., pride, enjoyment, networking, and friendship). The second problem is that we largely do not know the specific mechanism about how the social benefits created by a university can be converted into the resources that the university wants to obtain. For example, a university may want to know how the alumni homecoming event, the most popular alumni program offered by many universities, will result in alumni participation or monetary support. The last problem is that alumni can easily exit the relationship with their former university whenever the costs required to remain in the relationship with the university are greater than the benefits.

The purpose of this study aims to tackle these three managerial problems. Drawing on the literature from relationship marketing, this research proposes and empirically tests two governance strategies including identity salience and emotional attachment strategy in the alumni-university relationship where the traditional relationship governance strategies (relationship specific investment, dependence, incentives) may not be equally effective in this context. The first part of our conceptual framework illustrates the three social benefits created by university in the efforts for successful alumni relationships, involving the business network, the friendship network, and the enjoyment of participation. The second part shows the value capturing process by relating the social benefits to the identity salience and the emotional attachment strategy. The last part assesses their effects on the relationship outcome variables involving relationship-specific voluntary behavior and symbolic consumption behavior. We empirically tested our conceptual model using alumni from a large university. Online survey was utilized to collect the data.

The results from structural equation model provide managerial implications as well as theoretical contributions as follows; First, to properly govern social exchange relationship, university needs to ensure the extent to which alumni realize the social benefits that the university creates. Second, the identity salience strategy is more effective for the symbolic consumption (e.g., university logo products) while the emotional attachment strategy greatly influences the relationship-specific voluntary behavior (e.g., working as an alumni board member). Finally, while a considerable body of prior relationship marketing literature has only focused on the exchange relationships where relational partners expect to exchange direct and economic rewards, this research investigates the boundary situation in which relational partners focus on indirect and noneconomic rewards or social benefits.