CSR Perception Type and Customer Extra-Role Behavior: The Mediating Mechanisms of Customer-Company Identification and Emotional Attachment

Today’s customers play a crucial role in value co-creation with a firm by performing extra voluntarily to help the firm achieve its overall benefits. It should be noted that such supportive behavior of customers arises from the evaluation of a firm being responsible. The purpose of this research is to examine how CSR perception type can elicit differentiated customer responses through a moral lens by unveiling the cognitive and affective processes involved. The research design includes three scenario-based experiments. Experimental data analyzed using the SEM approach reveal that customers will have more extra-role behaviors when perceive CSR practices are group-oriented than individual-oriented. Further, the relationship between customers’ CSR perceptions and customer extra-role behaviors is sequentially mediated by customer-company identification and emotional attachment. The findings also reported the moderating role of moral foundations in the relationship between CSR perceptions and customer-company identification in the Chinese context. The findings of this study offer experimental evidence on how CSR type elicit differentiated responses from a moral lens.