Made for each other? Psychological contracts and service brands evaluations Russel P.J. Kingshott School of Marketing, Curtin University, Perth, Australia Sanjaya Singh Gaur Division of Programs in Business, School of Continuing and Professional Studies, New York University, New York, New York, USA Piyush Sharma School of Marketing, Curtin University, Perth, Australia Sheau Fen Yap Department of Marketing, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, and Yekaterina Kucherenko EvolutionFX, Auckland, New Zealand Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the individual and combined effects of three types of psychological contracts between customers and service employees (i.e. transactional, relational and communal), resulting from the service organizations’ relational marketing efforts, on their customers’ service brand evaluations in terms of their satisfaction, trust and commitment toward the brand. Design/methodology/approach – This study uses a field-survey of 303 regular customers of beauty salons and hairdressers in Auckland, New Zealand. All the constructs were measured using adapted versions of well-established scales and data was analyzed using SmartPLS due to the relatively smaller sample size and the primary research objective being the prediction of the three outcome variables (i.e. satisfaction, trust and commitment). Findings – Transactional and relational contracts have a negative and positive impact, respectively, upon communal contracts. Communal contracts mediate the impact of transactional and relational contracts on trust and commitment but not on satisfaction. Trust also mediates the relationship between satisfaction and commitment. Research limitations/implications – This paper collected data from female customers of beauty salons and hairdressers in New Zealand, which may affect the generalizability of the results. Practical implications – This study provides practical insights into the differences in the roles of psychological contracts between the customers and service employees, which may help managers in service firms improve their customer relationship outcomes. Originality/value – This paper extends the relationship and services marketing literature to reveal the individual and combined effects of the three types of psychological contracts on customer satisfaction, trust and commitment toward their service brand. Keywords Relationship marketing, Trust, Commitment, Frontline service employees Paper type Research paper Introduction In service settings, relationship marketing (RM) success is contingent upon understanding and responding to customer expectations (Bitner, 1995; Grönroos, 2017). While expectation fulfillment to the satisfaction of the customer underpins the building of loyal customers (Olsen and Johnson, 2003), the underlying pretext is that service firms know the specific nature of their customer’s expectations. Typically, managers have been able to draw on the Gaps model (Zeithaml et al., 1993) to help them align the service entities’ understanding of what the customer expects (i.e. Gap 1). However, as many customer expectations are also a function of explicit and implicit promises made by the firm (Zeithaml et al., 1993), this potentially means service firm may be unaware of some of the promises made to the customer. To help understand and articulate the range of potential promises made by one party to another, the literature has recognized these promises represent terms of psychological contracts (PCs) that the promisor has made with the recipient. Typically, studies elsewhere have shown their formation plays an important role in helping shape overall relationships (Finch et al., 2015; Funches, 2016; Kingshott et al., 2020; Kingshott and Pecotich, 2007; Llewellyn, 2001; Malhotra et al., 2017; Pavlou and Gefen, 2005; Rousseau, 2016) but those in the services domain showing how PCs affects relationships with the customer are somewhat scant. As service relationships comprise the need to fulfill both implicit and The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/0887-6045.htm Journal of Services Marketing © Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 0887-6045] [DOI 10.1108/JSM-01-2020-0002] Received 3 January 2020 Revised 26 May 2020 Accepted 9 July 2020