Towards a measure for perceived motives behind CSI incidents
(A2021-94614)

AUTHORS

Grzegorz Zasuwa, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin; Wiktor Razmus, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to provide preliminary research findings on perceived organizational motives behind CSI incidents. Study 1 explores what types of reasons for these incidents are typically perceived by consumers and identifies items that can be used for their operationalization. Building on these results, studies 2 and 3 are carried out to perform preliminary validation of the scale for CSI organizational attributions. The analysis reveals four major categories of motives that consumers attribute to corporate wrongdoing, including immorality-, savings-, performance- and difficulty-driven attributions. Results of Study 3 supports four-factor structure of the scale, as well as its convergent and discriminant validity. Moreover, study 3 demonstrates that immorality- and performance-driven attributions enhance company’s blame, whereas difficulty-driven attributions reduce the blame. Thus, the study shows that a proposed scale can be useful in explaining consumer responses to CSI incidents.

REFERENCES

The study was supported by a grant from National Science Centre, Poland, no. 2018/31/B/HS4/00385