1 - Elvisnei Camargo Conceição PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL (PUCRS) - Escola de Negócios
2 - Arnaldo Fernandes Matos Coelho Universidade de Coimbra - FEUC
3 - Cristela Maia Bairrada Universidade de Aveiro - Instituto de Superior de Contabilidade e Administração da Universidade de Aveiro
Reumo
Increasingly, concern about consumer behavior plays a key role in the life of organizations. In recent years, this concern has "taken sleep" from managers of higher education institutions (HEIs), especially business schools. The change in societies has generated crises strong enough to rethink its dynamics, structure and performance. The highly competitive environment in which Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) operate, with changes in people's way of life, reflects in market positioning and in their educational policies. This increases the need to understand student behavior.
With the objective of increasing knowledge about the students of a business school in the south of Brazil, this article, using the structural equations modeling technique, analyzes the relationship between the perception of value and the students' satisfaction with their experience in this higher level school. In addition, it investigates the existence of a relationship between the students 'perception of value, the expectation of career success and positive word of mouth (WOM) mediated by the students' satisfaction with their university experience.
The theoretical basis used in this article involved the concepts of: perceived value for the student; Satisfaction with the course; Expectation of professional success and positive word-of-mouth. It also included the concept of corporate reputation. In the context of providing educational services, satisfaction can be understood as to how students evaluate their academic experience. Having as central construct the academic experience, this section of the article, reviews the main scientific publications involving the concepts mentioned above, revisiting the main authors of the area.
A study using a quantitative-descriptive approach was conducted with students from the Business School of a renowned university in South of Brazil. The survey was applied to 383 undergraduate students. The study evaluated 11 hypotheses related to the constructions of the conceptual model. The collected data were analyzed using the Structural Equation Analysis (SEM) technique. The measure and the structural submodels were estimated. Reliability, construct validity and discriminant were verified. SPSS and AMOS software was used for data processing and processing.
The results obtained with the 11 hypotheses tested showed that there is no evidence supported by the model that the perception of functional value, social and conditional is positively related to course satisfaction. However, there is sufficient evidence to affirm that the perception of epistemic and emotional value has a positive relationship with satisfaction with higher education. All other hypotheses were accepted except the hypothese 11 that affirmed that corporate reputation interferes as moderator of the relationship between value perception and satisfaction. This was rejected.
Examining the results obtained in the analysis and discussion it is verified that the students consider emotional and epistemic value as determinants of their satisfaction. On the other hand, they do not recognize this influence on functional, social and conditional values, contrary to other findings in research involving students. Another surprising result is the non-interference of the moderating corporate reputation variable over the studied variables. It is also concluded that HEIs should devote more attention to research that involves the behavior, attitudes and values of all stakeholders
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