The impact of corporate social responsibility, service quality and customer- company identification on customers

Conference: 9th International Strategic Management Conference -- Location: Riga, LATVIA -- Date: JUN 27-29, 2013Despite the importance of corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR) as an important construct in academia and a pressing item on corporate agenda, some contradictory results suggesting that CSR is far away from being the most dominant criteria in purchase behavior call for further research on the topic. Research supporting this view suggests that traditional criteria such as price, quality and brand familiarity are still the most important choice criteria. Acknowledging the significant role that quality can play in the context of services, this study incorporates these two separate views and considers the effect that both CSR and service quality have on customer-related outcomes such as customer- company identification, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The study also investigates the mediating role of customer- company identification, pointing to the fact that improving customers' psychological attachment to a company can serve as a strategic tool for enhancing the effect that CSR and service quality have on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. To test the hypothesized relationships, an online questionnaire is conducted to a sample of 242 bank customers.Int Strateg Management & Managers Assoc

Faith and Fair Trade: The Moderating Role of Contextual Religious Salience

Normative and historical arguments support the idea that religion potentially shapes decisions to support fair trade products. That said, the question of how religion influences organizational decision-makers to purchase fair trade products in a business-to-business context has remained largely unaddressed. This research examines the interactive effect of individual religious commitment and contextual religious salience on an individual's willingness to pay a price premium for a fair trade product, when buying on behalf of an organization. Findings from two experimental studies (involving 75 and 87 working individuals, respectively) reveal that the effect of a decision-maker's religious commitment on his or her willingness to pay a price premium, for the purchase of a fair trade product on behalf of an organization, is moderated by the contextual salience of religion. Specifically, when religion is highly salient in the organizational context, religious commitment is positively related to the decision-maker's willingness to pay a premium for the fair trade product; when contextual religious salience is low, religious commitment and willingness to pay a premium are unrelated. Implications for theory and practice are presented. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht