The Usage Of Apology And Justification To Repair Benevolence And Integrity

Trust is a social construct that is present in the day-to-day routine of humans especially in the context of social entrepreneurship as the success is determined by the social capital it accumulates.Negative events such as product failure,revelations of corrupt practices,and unfulfilled promises could distort trusting relationships,develop negative future expectations,and ultimately lead to organizational stigmatization.This study investigates how social entrepreneurs manage event stigma using apology and justification as means of repairing integrity-based and benevolence-based trust violations.Using a social enterprise working in the environmental conservation and food processing industry,this research adopts a quantitative survey methodology using self-administered questionnaires to collect data from 304 consumers of services from a fictitious social enterprise in Cameroon called EcoHealth.Hypothesis testing was carried out using structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis.Through a scenario questionnaire survey,the study provided support for all of the hypotheses.Hypotheses 1 and 2 focused on the strategies of repairing trust.The verification of Hypotheses 3a and 3b confirmed that benevolence-based trust had an important moderating effect on the positive relationship between apology,justification and trust repair.This shows that apology and justification are a good combination factor that can be used for repairing trust in a stigmatized social enterprise.With the help of benevolence,consumers can easily accept to re-engage with the organization after trust violation.More so,integrity-based trust had a moderating effect on apology and trust repair because the consumers perceived EcoHealth's apology as a form of integrity on their side which confirms that H4a is a moderator.However,we found that integrity is not a moderating factor between justification and trust repair eventually not confirming H4b.This shows that in the process of repairing trust violation,applying justification without apology does not really show the integrity of the organization.