善行必定有善报吗——消费者抵制企业社会责任行为的内在机理研究

Can Good Deeds always Lead to Rewards? A Study on the Mechanism of Consumers' Boycott to CSR

现实中存在企业做了善事却引发消费者负面抵制的现象,其内在机理值得研究。本文以心理契约违背和折扣理论为基础,选择企业社会责任的时间选择及其与品牌匹配度作为刺激因素,构建了一个包括企业社会责任、心理契约违背、消费者抵制和消费者利他倾向在内的研究框架,并通过情景模拟实验方法对研究框架进行了检验。研究结果表明:(1)与品牌低匹配以及时间选择较被动的企业社会责任行为,均会刺激消费者心理契约违背的产生,而且后者比前者刺激作用更大;(2)感知到的企业社会责任与消费者抵制行为负相关,但企业社会责任感知会通过心理契约违背促进消费者抵制行为的产生;(3)企业社会责任与抵制行为的负向关系会因消费者利他倾向增强,利他倾向越高,越不会产生抵制行为。但是当消费者感知到心理契约违背时,利他倾向越高,越会产生抵制行为。

Almost every past research demonstrated that CSR will exert positive impact on consumers' attitude, brand's celebrity and company's market performance, but we can't ignore the fact that CSR may also generate negative results. Such as Vanke donated to people harmed by earthquake in 2008, but consumers thought it's self-interested as it is completed under the pressure of consumers,critics and boycott gave great shock to Vanke. This paper aimed to testify whether CSR will be boycott by consumers, and if so, under which condition it will happen and why it would be that. Based on past related researches, we suppose that if CSR is reactive(vs proactive) or the cause doesn't fit the brand, consumers would perceive that their psychological contracts with the brand are violated, so they will boycott the brand to give punishment and hope other brands will do it better. We also argue that the whole process is influenced by consumers' altruistic tendency.The research sample consists of 434 students from a university in central China. Every participant was randomly distributed to one of the four situations about CSR(timing: proactive vs. reactive; fit vs. non-fit), then they will be asked to complete a questionnaire including their perception of CSR, of psychological contracts violation, their altruistic tendency, their intention to boycott and some demographic information. Theoretical hypotheses were tested by hierarchical linear modeling and structural equation modeling.As the results show, in line with past researches, consumers' perception of CSR is negatively related to boycott, in other words, CSR generally would not be boycott by consumers. But once there is a perceived violation of psychological contracts triggered by reactive CSR, it will be boycotted and the psychological contracts violation plays a full-mediating role. In the non-fit situation, there is the partial mediating role of psychological contract violation. We also got a really interesting finding about the moderating role of consumers' altruistic tendency, like a double-edged sword, when there is not perceived violation of psychological contracts, it will enhance the negative relationship between CSR and boycott, but once violation is perceived, it will enhance the positive relationship between violation and boycott. To the best of my knowledge, few researches have tried to testify the fact that CSR would have negative effects on the brand, let alone to explore the underlying mechanism. So the first contribution of this study is that we hypothesized the side effect of CSR on firms and explored the reason. The second contribution is that we figured out under which conditions the boycott would happen. With these two contributions, firms should not only keep it in mind that CSR is not always the grand cure, but also know how to avoid the potential side effect of CSR. The third contribution would be the interesting finding about consumers' altruistic tendency, it could help firms with CSR, but it could also destroy these firms if consumers realize that they are being manipulated or even cheated. So the firms should treat consumers sincerely and hold more understandings about the attributes of sophisticated consumers.