Os motivos das relações entre os construtos qualidade percebida, confiança, comprometimento e lealdade na educação a distância

Abstract

This term paper had as objective to understand the process of human relationship formation between companies and clients. More specifically, it was analyzed the reasons which create the relations between trust, perceived quality, commitment and loyalty in order to develop them and to consolidate them. In terms of the study market, it is justified the chosen of the graduation sector, more specifically virtual courses, because this sector is considered one of the sectors with great importance for our society, which is in constant development and it is really competitive. We observe that this sector is been studied by some authors such as Tinto (1975, 2006) Hennig-Thurau, Singh and Sabol (2001) and Sirdeshmukh, Singh and Sabol (2002).This way, the educational sector is ready for the development of the study proposal. Another relevant point is about the research and the market which look for the understanding in terms of the actors of this market, and this understanding is one of the principal reasons of this work. Through an exploratory study of quality nature, individual and deeply educational interview were done, involving experts of lots of areas (managers and coordinators), teachers and students in order to analyze the source of data together with a bibliographic review. With the development of the content analyzed in the interview, it was possible to find a series of relevant discoveries which will make we understand better the principal reasons that are in the relationships between the basic construct of this study. The results show that, for the relation between perceived quality and loyalty, the relevant reasons were: feeling of being well received, motivation and credibility. To the trust and loyalty, it was found as reasons: transparency, commitment of the client/student with the institution, reflection of the learning as a result of the course and the good faith. In the relation of commitment and loyalty, the cognitive commitment (calculative) was highlighted as the principal reason: the changes proportionate for the certificate. At the end of the work, it is presented the conclusions about the contributions of the study to the development of the relational marketing theory, and its management implications that help educational marketing professionals and managers of graduation institutions, so that it could be used in actions to motivate the interest of the clients/students. To finish it, it is presented a future research in order to motivate other researchers in the search of new knowledge in the area.