Modeling the Relationship between Consumer Social Responsibility and Preference for Social Friendly Products with Facilitating Role of Religiosity: A Prospective Study using Theory of Planned Behavior

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to operationalize the concept of Consumer Social Responsibility which is further empirically tested to predict consumers preference to buy societal friendly products. The study contributes in the body of knowledge by developing, validating and measuring consumer social responsibility. Moreover, it also predicts the antecedents of CNSR including ESI, Personality traits, and Cultural dimensions with moderating role of religiosity. An exploratory sequential mixed methods were used to test the proposed model of moderated mediation and sequential mediation by collecting data from 613 consumers who were aware of societal friendly concepts of products. The present study has used AMOS and NVIVO which helped in data analysis by calculating estimates, model fitness, ex ploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The consumer social responsibility is opertaionalized as an attitudinal aspect which is further catego rized into: community, society, environment, and customers. The results showed that CNSR is an important predictor of consumer buying behavior of societal friendly products which is influenced by ethical self-identity of consumers, their personality and culture. External religiosity is reflected as a moderator which influences the relationship of consumers ethical identity on CNSR. The opera tionalization of CNSR will help managers to devise consumer oriented strategies by inculcating the factors that determine and enhance social responsibility among consumers. Moreover, the operationalization opens new avenues for researchers to predict other demographic or psychographic factors that may influence CNSR.