Abstract
An important objective of business research is to understand how organizational practices can influence consumer attitude and behaviors in order to help achieve organizational goals via consumer purchase intention. It was proposed and found in this study that consumers’ perceptions of certain Corporate Social Irresponsible (CSI) practices serves as antecedents of consumer purchase intention (PI) via corporate reputation (CR) and consumer attitude (CA). On the one hand, this finding may help understand the “black box” between CSI practices and PI. On the other hand, while CR refers to customers’ evaluations of the reputation of the organization and CSI represent a significant channel the organization uses to channel its irresponsible behavior to the community, CR and CA literatures have not comprehensively examined the effect of CSI practices on consumers CA and CR beliefs. The findings in the hierarchical regression from a sample of 455 consumers of products in a large corporate organization in Kenya as a study documenting a negative association between CSI practices and CR and CA with PI suggests that consumers draw inferences from the CSI-related treatment they receive in assessing the supportiveness of the organization. By implementing CSI practices that demonstrate the organization does not care about the community and values their contribution, organizations are likely to be perceived as engaging in a high level of irresponsible behaviour. The results of this study add to our knowledge about the antecedents of CR and CA. Moreover, this study bridges the gap in the literature, by combining CSI, CR, CA and PI.
Highlights
Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) cannot be discussed in isolation of stakeholder theory and corporate social responsibility. Freeman (1984) defines stakeholders as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm’s objectives; those groups who are vital to the survival and success of the corporation (Freeman, 2004)
This new situation has aroused interest in CSI from a professional point of view; on the one hand, for the important penalties that all irresponsible behaviours can generate at the corporate level and, on the other, because it has become clear that in the wake of the irresponsible behaviour can be perceived an absence of values and ethical principles among the top executives of companies
The independent variable (IV) explained 13.1% variance in consumer purchase intention and as such the model was slightly of good fit. These results indicate that corporate reputation (CR) fully mediated the relationship between corporate social irresponsibility and consumer purchase intention, which supports Hypothesis three. (H3)
Summary
Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) cannot be discussed in isolation of stakeholder theory and corporate social responsibility. Freeman (1984) defines stakeholders as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm’s objectives; those groups who are vital to the survival and success of the corporation (Freeman, 2004). During the last global economic and financial crisis, and thanks to the broadcasting role of the media, a significant number of business outrages have been reported, which showed an exceptional increase in their occurrence This new situation has aroused interest in CSI from a professional point of view; on the one hand, for the important penalties that all irresponsible behaviours can generate at the corporate level and, on the other, because it has become clear that in the wake of the irresponsible behaviour can be perceived an absence of values and ethical principles among the top executives of companies. This present study gears towards filling the gap by addressing one important aspect of consumer intention, i.e. purchase intention by unfolding the “black box” inherent within corporate social irresponsibility, corporate reputation, consumer attitude and their implication on purchase intention
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