Articlegreen2021

When doing good will not save us: Revisiting the buffering effect of CSR following service failures

Paolo Antonetti · Benedetta Crisafulli · Stan Maklan

25 citations0/0 files storedPsychology and Marketing

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Customer Service Quality and Loyalty Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification

Abstract

Abstract Past research offers inconsistent evidence on whether CSR is an effective service recovery strategy. Current debates overlook the signals that service failures send about the company, and their interplay with CSR. We propose a moderated mediation model showing that CSR's effectiveness for service recovery depends upon failure type. For failures signaling a lack of skills and expertise, CSR enhances warmth which in turn lowers revenge. Warmth further increases perceived competence which influences conciliatory responses. CSR, however, does not help if the failure signals a lack of moral integrity. Both warmth and competence explain the CSR's buffering effect. Our study demonstrates that “doing good” helps only to the extent that service failures that do not raise doubts about the character of the company. Even in these circumstances, however, the buffering effect of CSR is observed only in case of customer–firm communal relationships. Consistent evidence from three experiments revisits more optimistic assessments of the ability of CSR to act as a recovery strategy and shows that CSR can help only under very circumscribed conditions. Managerially, we show how and when the CSR buffer applies in service contexts, offering insights on how managers can best reap the potential benefits of service brands' involvement in CSR.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

References

1981Evaluating Structural Equation Models with Unobservable Variables and Measurement Error 2002A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition.1994Customer Loyalty: Toward an Integrated Conceptual Framework 2009Instructional manipulation checks: Detecting satisficing to increase statistical power 2008Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map 1999A Model of Customer Satisfaction with Service Encounters Involving Failure and Recovery 2004Corporate social responsibility and consumers' attributions and brand evaluations in a product–harm crisis 1999A Model of Customer Satisfaction with Service Encounters Involving Failure and Recovery

Cited by

2023Will consumers give us another chance to bounce back? Effects of precrisis commitments to social and product responsibility on brand resilience 2022Implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility Environmental Actions in Comparison of Small, Medium, and Large Enterprises in the Slovak Republic 2025Buffering or catalyzing? The impact of brand age on consumer responses to competence-related versus ethics-related brand crisis

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.