Research On The Effect Of Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation On Consumers’ Moral Emotion And Behavior In A Product–Harm Crisis

Product-harm crises are omnipresent in recent years. There are substantial direct and indirect costs incurred when a product–harm crisis occurs. More specifically, it can stimulate consumers’ anger emotion, and then lead to an increasing tendency of revenge in order to make the target corporation pay. Even if consumers do not take the initiative to retaliate, they won’t easily forgive the target corporation. Thus the relationship between consumers and the target corporation will reach a deadlock or even be terminated. what’s worse,a brand‘s equity, however, can be very fragile. It may be destroyed on one day because of consumers’ destructive behavior in a product–harm crisis. Considering the spillover effect as well as the characteristics of suddenness, high uncertainty and urgency, corporations often cannot completely avoid a product-harm crisis. A sudden product-harm crisis will make the corporations get into trouble. Hence, many companies tend to build a positive corporate social responsibility reputation before a product–harm crisis as a preventive strategy in order to minimize potential damages that triggered by the crisis. Building close relationship with stakeholders is regarded as an important part of a crisis plan. The construction of positive pre-crisis CSR reputation will contribute to the plan.For the question whether the goodwill reserved by the pre-crisis CSR reputation will help mitigating the tendency of consumers‘ revenge while increasing the tendency of consumers‘ forgiveness, previous studies not only have no consensus, but also get two completely opposite viewpoints. That is most scholars support the notion of risk management theory, which states that the positive pre-crisis CSR reputation can act as an insurance policy against the negative impact of untoward events such as product–harm crises. Specifically the positive CSR reputation communicates the underlying values of the company, which can lead a strong psychological bond with stakeholders before crises. When a crisis occurs, the positive CSR reputation can help the corporation wining the emotional and intellectual support of stakeholders and offering it more opportunities to recovery quickly from the crisis. Therefore, most scholars support that the positive CSR reputation can mitigate the tendency of consumers‘ revenge while increasing the tendency of their forgiveness. However,other scholars support the notion of expectancy violations theory, which states that the positive inertial effects of positive CSR reputation are limited before a crisis occurs. When a product-harm crisis hits, positive pre-crisis CSR reputation may backfire. That is positive pre-crisis CSR reputation can be viewed as an implicit promises from corporations to their customers and psychological contracts between corporations and their customers. Consumers may view a product-harm crisis as a ―breach of promises and psychological contracts,‖ and hence may exhibit more negative responses including cognition, emotion and behavior. Similar to academic studies, the practice of pre-crisis CSR reputation also encounters a dilemma. What we know is that while some organizations do benefit from CSR, others, despite investing substantially in it, fail to capitalize on its gains. what’s more,some organizations‘ CSR efforts even backfire.Considering the seemingly contradictory viewpoints of academic researches and the practical dilemma, the paper analyzes and summarizes the causes which are listed as follows. First of all, the existing researches consider product-harm crises as homogeneous events therefore they neglect the role of situational factors. Then there remains a dearth of research looking at the psychological mechanisms through which stakeholders interpret and react to a product–harm crisis. In a highly charged environment such as that of a product–harm crisis, emotional processes may play a significant role, however the existing researches focus on the cognitive processes rather than emotional processes especially moral emotional processes. Besides, consumers‘ revenge and forgiveness as two coping strategies have been largely overlooked in moral failure settings. In addition, the topic has been rigorously studied in western context while few studied in Chinese context. Therefore the purpose of this study is to unravel the discrepancy in the literature and break through the practical dilemma by offering a more detailed model of product-harm crises in Chinese context. The question remains to be settled by this study is that whether and how the interpretations of product–harm crises by consumers in different crisis situations affect the relationship of pre-crisis CSR reputation and consumer behavior.Considering the effects of cognition and emotion on consumers‘ behavior, the research focus on the mechanism of how pre-crisis CSR reputation affects consumer‘s moral anger and behavior. It contributes to the existing literature by proposing risk management mechanism and expectancy disconfirmation mechanism according to risk management theory and expectancy disconfirmation theory. Then it explains the contradictory viewpoints of expectancy disconfirmation theory and risk management theory by analyzing the unity of opposites between the two mechanisms from both one-way and two-way views. Then the research puts forward a decision-making process model of product-harm crises which illuminates a complete decision-making procedure from getting into a dilemma to breaking through the dilemma. Furthermore, the study outlines a general analytic framework by introducing attribution theory for reconciling the contradictory viewpoints. At last this dissertation designs four experiments to test the effects of CSR reputation to consumers‘ moral anger, revenge and forgiveness in different attributions.Several conclusions are achieved. Firstly without taking situational factors into consideration, pre-crisis CSR reputation has negative impact on consumers‘ revenge simultaneously has positive impacts on consumers‘ forgiveness. Secondly, moral anger plays an intermediary role between pre-crisis CSR reputation and consumer behavior. Thirdly, consumer attributions moderate the relationship between pre-crisis CSR reputation and consumers‘ moral anger. Moreover, in low controllability condition, high controllability condition, low stability condition, low severity condition and low intentionality condition, risk management mechanism plays a leading role. In such cases, pre-crisis CSR reputation significantly alleviates moral anger. In high stability condition and high intentionality condition, expectancy disconfirmation mechanism plays a leading role. In such cases, pre-crisis CSR reputation significantly stimulates moral anger. In the high severity condition, neither the effect of risk management mechanism nor that of expectancy disconfirmation mechanism is significant. Lastly, consumers‘ attributions moderate the indirect effect of pre-crisis CSR reputation to consumer behavior through moral anger. Furthermore, in high stability condition, pre-crisis CSR reputation can alleviate consumers‘ forgiveness through stimulating moral anger while pre-crisis CSR reputation cannot promote consumers‘ revenge through stimulating moral anger. By contrast, in high intentionality condition, pre-crisis CSR reputation can alleviate consumers‘ forgiveness through stimulating moral anger, while promote consumers‘ revenge through stimulating moral anger.The results suggest that on the whole, pre-crisis CSR reputation can protect corporations from hitting by a crisis. When taking situational factors into consideration, the positive pre-crisis CSR reputation can be seen as double-edged sword. Now therefore in the dissertation, a dynamic linkage model which situates corporations, consumers, the government and the community within the realm of product-harm crises is proposed as a practical framework.