• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.1-18
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• 2016

This study examines the impact of consumer ethics on the CSR motive attributions and, the subsequent consumer perception of the firm's ethicality. Data of 512 adults were collected nationwide using a self-administered questionnaire online. Exploratory and confirmative factor analysis were employed to identify six underlying dimensions of consumer ethics, as follows: actively benefiting from illegal actions, passively benefiting from illegal actions, no harm/no foul, economic benefiting from illegal actions, intellectual property infringement, and pro-environmental behavior. In order to examine the relationships between consumer ethics, CSR motive attribution, and consumer perceived ethicality, a structural equation modeling test was conducted. The results demonstrated that actively benefiting from illegal actions, economic benefiting from illegal action, and pro-environmental behavior had impacts on CSR motive attributions such as strategy-driven attribution, value-driven attribution, and stakeholder-driven attribution. Consequently, strategy-driven attribution and value-driven attribution influenced the consumer perception of the firm's ethicality, whereas stakeholder-driven attribution did not. This study provides an understanding of the CSR attribution mechanism from the view of consumer ethics that are multi-dimensional. The ethical judgements on different types of consumer behavior lead to attributions of CSR motives and subsequently their perception of a firm's ethicality.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.47-56
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• 2020

Purpose: This study aims to explore how consumers respond to the immoral actions of a CEO. More specifically, this research focuses on the moral reasoning processes used by consumers in order to maintain support for the CEO despite the immoral action. In addition, this research suggests that support for the CEO would improve product purchase intention. Research design, data, and methodology: To test the hypotheses presented, an online research company was hired and online survey was conducted with adult participants. Online research company sent an email to the potential subjects asking their participation in an online survey. Subjects were able to participate in the online survey by clicking a link to the survey. When the participants clicked the link, they were instructed to read a fictitious newspaper article on a CEO's immoral action. And then, they were asked to answer several questions online. Responses were obtained from 336 adults participants and data were analyzed using SPSS Hayes Macro for a moderation effect and AMOS for a structural equation model. Result: Moral reasoning processes were divided into moral decoupling and moral rationalization and analyzed to determine their influence on product purchase. Also in this study, we suggest the public self-consciousness of consumers as an antecedent of moral reasoning processes, and argue that consumers with high public self-consciousness are more likely to engage in moral decoupling than moral rationalization. Conclusions: Our results showed that moral decoupling and moral rationalization improved the consumer's perception of corporate ethicality, which increased product purchase intention. In addition, consumers with high public self-consciousness were more likely to engage in moral decoupling than in moral rationalization. In addition, this research suggested that severity of the scandal would moderate the impact of public self-consciousness on moral decoupling. However, this hypothesis was not supported statistically since most participants perceived the scandal to be a highly severe incident, that may lead to an insignificant interaction effect between severity of the scandal and public self-consciousness. This research expands the scope of available research on corporate ethics and consumer responses to negative information involving celebrities and provides practical implications for corporate crisis management.