RESEARCH ARTICLE

Copyright © 2018 American Scientific Publishers Advanced Science Letters

All rights reserved Vol. 24, 407-410 2018
Printed in United States of America

Service Quality Moderating Effect into Intention-

Behaviour Relation: The Case of Bank Muamalat
Malaysia Berhad
Altounjy Rana,a* Abdullah Naziruddin,a Ali Azlanb
a
Business School, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
b
Head of Program (BAC), School of Business and Management, University College of Technology Sarawak

The Islamic finance industry has witnessed a remarkable growth during this last decade, and in
certain parts of the world this growth has been extraordinary. And in the scope of this remarkable
growth Islamic banks are required to offer higher quality services and products that meet their
customers’ expectations. This present study investigates the service quality practiced by the Islamic
banks and its effect on converting the Intention to a real Behaviour of adopting Islamic banking
services. Practical results demonstrated that the relationship between Intention and Behaviour in
customers was predominantly sensitive to the differences in service quality, and not without
significant moderating effects observed for all of the six service quality dimensions studied.

Keywords: Islamic Banks, Consumer behaviour, TPB, SQ, Malaysia

1. INTRODUCTION to a real action which in some studies exceeded a level of 31%

Cancer Due to a rise in the number of Islamic financial service
providers in Malaysia, these providers have lately found
themselves operating in a highly competitive environment,
which in return has led to the enhancement of competitiveness
in the market level.1 The need to survive and grow their
customer base, has lead the decision makers of Islamic banks
to consider providing combined competitive products with high
level service quality, and use this combination as a key
advantage to compete among each other.1-3
Adoption of the Islamic banking services and delivery of these
services within a high level of quality, are issues that need to
be addressed in Islamic financial services, and the most
efficient way to do so is by implementing the most
contemporary techniques to strengthen the Islamic financial
services system, therefore allowing it to contend alongside the
well-established non-Islamic financial services system, and
claim its place within the mainstream financial system.
The theory of planned behaviour introduced by Ajzen4 has
been considered the most applied theory by researchers who
aimed to figure out the cognitive determinants of rational
human behaviours. In Ajzens theory Intention is accentuated as
the main predictor of Behaviour, and the studies which have
been built on this theory have also confirmed the predictive
power of Intention towards Behaviour. The pragmatic support
of this prediction ability can be extracted by meta-analysis and
review for the previous studies has indicated that 20% to 41%
of behavioural variance can be clarified by the intention. 5-7
Academically, this level of effect is considered as a medium to
high level; but correspondingly, there is still a gap occurring
that needs to be justified; this gap is due to a missing number
among those that promote a positive intention but not express it
of the population, although this is causing a lack of consistency
between Intention and Behaviour.8-10
______________________________________________________________________________
*rana.altounjy@s.unikl.edu.my
The studies cited that differences in perception is not the main
originator to variances in the Intention-Behaviour relationship
among the people who intended to do the behaviour and did it
and those who showed positive intention but later did not
reflect as an action.10-11
A significant justification has been introduced 12 to explain the
absenteeism or the inconsistence in the occurrence of the
theorized relation between an exogenous variable (e.g.:
intention) and endogenous variable (e.g.: behaviour) which
proposed the need to have a third variable to explain the
change in the direction, or to strengthen the relationship
between those two variables. In addition, various levels of this
third variable might affect the intention-behaviour relation
which should be higher for a given level of this third variable
called an effect modifier or a moderator.13
2. THE SERVICE QUALITY IN ISLAMIC BANKS:
Islamic banks come along with a similar concept of
conventional banking services to offer their customer but still
proclaims compliance with the Sharia principles.14 However,
not all Muslims are convinced that Islamic banks follow the
Sharia rules completely, and are essentially different in their
values and practices from conventional banks. Also, having
some liberal Muslim societies made the religiosity less
applicable in expecting Muslims consumers’ behaviour
towards Islamic Banks. Which gave way to researchers to

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Adv.Sci. Lett. 24, 407-410, 2018
investigate other variables that may have an influence into
Muslim customers behaviour.15
The uniqueness of the services provided by the Islamic banks
encouraged the researchers to develop a new model that can be
used to measure the quality of these unique services provided
through this new method of banking. Different papers have
been done on this subject until Othman & Owen16 developed a
new instrument called the CARTER model which added the
compliance with shariah as the main dimension to measure the
service quality in Islamic Banks.
Applying the CARTER model become a trend among
researchers who used it in different cases to study it’s effect on
different variables. Many papers have been studying the
service quality under the CARTER model and it’s effect on
customer satisfaction and their research found a significant
level of satisfaction when the service model (CARTER) was
applied.16-18
3. INTENTION – ADOPTION RELATION:
Customers’ behaviour and adopters attitude has been studied
by numerous numbers of researchers who have applied
different theoretical models to clarify the major elements in
different adoption context.19 During the earlier stages of the
study, Adoption was considered a kind of variation of a
person’s behavior.20 But currently the areas of concern are to
explain the cause behind the deviation in people’s behaviour
where some people’s adoption can be loyal while others isn’t. 21
The Theory of Planned Behaviour4 which is an updated version
of the theory of reasoned action22 is considered as the most
significant theory in explaining and investigating human
behaviour, and it has been able to predict a wide range of
behaviours.23
The gap mentioned above between Intention and Behaviour
couldn’t be justified by variances in thought (i.e.: Attitude,
Subjective norm, Perceived behavioural control and
Intention)5,11 So, other researchers were motivated to
recommend the need to investigate the effect of other factors
on this relation. A third modifier or a moderator variable was
Baron and Kenny12 contribution to explain the lack or the
inconsistence in the occurrence of a theorized association
between the intention and the behaviour. This variable had a
direct effect on the direction and/or the strength of intention -
behaviour relationship, and it needs to be investigated11,24
under different settings to find the most compatible factor
based on each study ambience.
The quality of service is considered an important antecedent of
customers’ satisfaction,25 as the latter has been found to be an
important influencing factor of perception, post purchase, and
future decisions. The definition of customer satisfaction can be
stated as customers’ attitude and emotion on both the used
(purchased) product and received service. 26 A satisfied
customer can be a positive word -of -mouth for the product,
and hence can be used as a promotional tool for the product to
a third party. Many previous studies suggest a different
moderator for the intention-behaviour relationship6,27-29
depending on the area under investigation. In banking studies,
a few previous studies have investigated this relationship
finding30-31 that service quality has a positive effect on
customers’ decision to adopt the service. Additionally, a
limited number of prior studies about the effect of service
quality on the Islamic banking customers’ choice have
motivated the researcher to investigate it in this research.
4. DEVELOPMENT OF THE HYPOTHESIS:
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The researcher proposed the service quality as a moderator for
the Intention-Adoption relation based on previous studies that
show the effect of the service quality on the behaviour. In
addition, a face validity has been conducted amongst a group
of experts and academicians has validated this preposition by
ensuring the possibility of moderating effect of the service
quality, and they relied in this conclusion on the effect word of
mouth generated by high quality of service and how it can
really lead some people to convert from just intention to real
use of the service.
As mentioned above, the main objective of this study is to test
the moderating role of the service quality under the (CARTER)
model in the Intention – Behaviour relation in the settings of
Islamic banks services adoption in Malaysia.
Based on that, this research has one hypothesis to test which
is:
H1: Quality of service moderates the relationship between
individual intention and the adoption of Islamic banking
services
5. SAMPLE AND DATA COLLECTION:
The sample consisted of 310 customers of a fully fledged
Malaysian Islamic bank (Bank Muamalat Malaysia Berhad).
Structured questionnaires were used to collect data through a
direct personal survey. And out of the 310 responses gathered,
only 243 responses were usable for further analysis.
The sample for this study was comprised of customers of Bank
Muamalat branches in the city of Shah Alam. This banking
institution had dedicated its operations fully to Islamic banking
businesses only, making it the more suitable choice for this
study in comparison to the other banking institutions that
operate using Islamic windows, making it difficult to identify
customers that are using the Islamic windows from those that
are not. Therefore, these other banking institutions were not
eligible for this study.
Self-administered questionnaires intended to produce voluntary
participation were hand delivered to BMMB’s customers to
allow for data collection. The survey was conducted in August
2017 during banking hours. In order to make it more
convenient, research assistants who have been trained to speed
the distribution and collection of the data were seeking
respondents individually and helping them complete the survey
questionnaires. The selection of respondents varied according
to their age group, as well as their desire to take part in the
survey. This data collection method is similar to other
researchers approaches in their banking studies.32-33
6. RESEARCH INSTRUMENT
The questionnaire was divided into two sections. In the first
section demographic data was collected, while the second
section allowed for the variables measurements. In the second
section of the questionnaire, a total of three measures were
constructed. All of which were taken on from prior research
and adapted for the purpose of this study:
Intention,34-35 Service quality,16 Adoption35-36
A pilot study applying the same questionnaire was conducted
on 18 (BMMB) Islamic banks’ customers prior to the actual
study. The reason for conducting the pilot study was to identify
any problems associated with the study instrument, as well as
any other relevant issues. When asked to comment on the
efficiency of the questionnaires respondents replied that the
questions were easy to comprehend and could be completed
within an average time of five minutes. Only 243
questionnaires out of the 300 distributed were usable for
2
 RESEARCH ARTICLE
further analysis of the data. Profile of the respondents is
presented in two tables. Table I provides the overall breakdown
of the sampled respondents.

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Adv.Sci. Lett. 24, 407-410, 2018 RESEAR
CH ARTICLE

Table 1. Profile of respondents

Number Percent
Gender
Male 167 68.7
Female 76 31.3
Education attained
Certificate 25 10.2
Diploma 20 8.2
Bachelor or degree 168 69.1
Master 30 12.5
Age
20 - 30 52 21.3
31 - 40 159 65.4
Above 40 32 13.3
Religion
Muslim 217 89.3
Christians 16 6.5
Buddhists 10 4.2

Fig. 1. IV and DV without SQ

Fig. 2. SQ effec

4

7. DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDING
The study used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and
structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis to determine the
service quality effect on the customers behaviour.
Due to the small sample size in this study the use of PLS SEM
over other methods was justified as it has been used in previous
studies that have justified their usage of PLS SEM due to
different reasons like small sample size.37 Specifically, in this
case where the sample size here is 243. Therefore, PLS is
deemed appropriate. Also, PLS places minimal restrictions on
residual distributions. This goes to ensure that multivariate
normality is not an issue in PLS.
Assessment of the moderating effect:
The main objective of this paper is to assess the impact service
quality has upon the Intention-Adoption relation. We find that
a main model evaluation has been done, in addition to a
validity and reliability test, and an unidimensional assessment
that was made to ensure that all items have a factor loading of
0.5 and above for the model. When we compare the R2 of the
model with maintaining the significance of the effect between
the variables we can notice that the R2 has been increased
when we added the SQ as a moderator which means the
moderating effect is occurring.
8. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
In conclusion, we have found through this study that in order to
convert the perception from intention of use to an actual usage,
we must increase the level of service quality. Therefore, it is
advisable that the Islamic banks policy makers give more
attention to the quality of the service provided if their goal is to
broaden their customer base. An obvious limitation of this
study is the small size of the sample selected from a specific
institution leading the researcher to recommend a future
research into the same pool of interest with a higher number of
samples to be chosen from three or four different Islamic banks
customers.
This empirical study on the services quality moderator role in
the Intention-Behaviour relation using the survey method
contributes towards a better understanding of the customers’
behaviour towards Islamic banking services. Managers of
Islamic banks can now better apprehend the importance of the
service quality to convert the intention to real behaviour of
adopting Islamic banking as preferred banking scheme to use.
Not to mention, the findings of this study should be of value to
Islamic banks in terms of expanding their customer base.
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