DENG Xinming(Department of Business Administration), Xu, Y.

Publication:

Journal of Business Ethics（Vol.142, Issue 3, 2017, Pages: 515—526）

Abstract:

In order to explore the influencing mechanism of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on consumer’s purchase intention, this paper constructs a research framework including CSR, motivation attribution, consumer’s purchase intention, consumer’s altruistic tendency and Corporate Social Responsibility-Corporate Ability (CSR-CA) Belief, and tests the framework using a questionnaire survey. Empirical results demonstrate that CSR not only has positive influence on consumer’s purchase intention directly, but also has indirect positive influence on consumer’s purchase intention through motivation attribution; The influencing process of CSR on motivation attribution is positively moderated by consumer’s altruistic tendency; and the influencing process of motivation attribution on consumer’s purchase intention is negatively moderated by CSR-CA Belief.

The theoretical contributions are as follows. Firstly, conducting this research in China will make up for the traditional ones on the background of western developed countries. China is in the high-speed economic development period, but the contradictions of imbalanced economic development and social development is growing that some enterprises have malicious expansion of opportunism behavior tendency in pursuit of economic interests, so the problem whether corporates should fulfill the social responsibility is controversial. As China is the second-largest economy in the world, Chinese enterprises' behavior will have a major impact on world economy, so this study has some supplementary function for this research area. Secondly, this paper proposes a comprehensive research framework about the impact of CSR on consumers which discusses the influencing mechanism of CSR on consumer’s purchase intention from the perspective of motivation attribution, and explores the moderating effect of two individual characteristic variables in this process——consumer’s altruistic tendency and CSR-CA Belief, making up for the imperfection of existing researches.

【Key words】 Corporate Social Responsibility, Motivation Attribution, Purchase Intention, Consumer’s AltruisticTendency, CSR-CA Belief