The Mediating Effect Of Emotions Between Personal Control And Behavioral Intentions In Crisis Communication

In recent years, a variety of crises are happening in China. Crises not only cause great physical harm and psychological harm to consumers, but also bring negative impacts to the development of the enterprise. A burgeoning number of researches have been conducted on factors of corporate reputation, crisis types and crisis response strategies. However, little research examines on stakeholders’ emotion and their behavior intentions and explores how to choose crisis response strategies from the perspective of consumer’s emotion.Based on the research background, this research reports an exploratory investigation to the relationships among three variables: personal control, emotions(anger, sympathy, and schadenfreude), and behavioral intentions(negative word-of-mouth, purchase intention). The results of the research provide a cue on choosing effective crisis response strategies for crisis managers.To conduct the research, we gave a review of relevant literature on crisis communication and constructed the model of how personal control affects consumer’s behavioral intentions. By adopting methods of case study and questionnaire investigation, and through the use of the SPSS19.0, we gave an analysis of the data and tested the hypotheses. According to the results of correlation analysis and regression analysis, we found that:(1) personal control and behavioral intentions of negative word-of-mouth and purchase intention were both significantly correlated;(2) consumer’s emotion of anger and sympathy were significantly correlated with consumer’s behavior intentions including negative word-of-mouth and purchase intention;(3)personal control and consumer’s emotion of sympathy and anger were significantly correlated;(4) consumer’s emotions of anger and sympathy were mediators between personal control and consumer’s behavior intentions(negative word-of-mouth, purchase intention), the emotion of schadenfreude failed to play as a mediator between personal control and the two behavioral intentions in our research. Thus, future research should examine how crisis response strategies can be used to reduce feelings of anger and increase feelings of sympathy, thus mitigating the damage(reputation damage, reduced purchase intention) of a crisis.In this thesis, the results of the research on the one hand make a theoretical contribution to the study of consumer’s emotion after a crisis occurs; on the other hand the results give a feasible guidance to matching crisis response strategies to consumer’s emotion.