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This study aims to investigate an under-researched area, the impact of causal attributions (i.e. causal stability and company-related/-unrelated attributions) on salespeople’s job satisfaction following their performance appraisal.

A pre-test and a between-subjects experimental study test the effect of accurate or biased perceptions of causal attributions on salespeople’s job satisfaction. Data collected from 209 salespeople provide evidence that they make perceptual attribution errors in their appraisals of the performance outcome they achieve or do not achieve.

When salespeople correctly attribute their performance, causal stability affects their job satisfaction. However, company-related attributions affect their satisfaction only in the case of a poor performance outcome. As expected, salespeople who make biased attributions experience misattributed or “unwarranted” satisfaction or dissatisfaction, a higher or lower satisfaction level than they would have experienced had they made proper causal attributions.

Using Weiner’s theory of emotion and motivation as a theoretical framework, this study confirms that cognitive appraisals of event outcomes (in this case performance reviews) impacts salespeople’s emotional experience. Furthermore, causal ascriptions following the salesperson’s performance appraisal affect job satisfaction.

This study discusses how managers can ensure the continued satisfaction of their salespeople, which constitutes a stable source of motivation, by understanding their performance attributions.

This study introduces a new concept of misattributed job satisfaction or dissatisfaction. While anecdotally some scholars have investigated when salespeople play “the blame game”, this study shows how salespeople correctly or incorrectly ascribe blame for the outcomes and the impact on job satisfaction.

The purpose of this research is the exploration of online complainants' revenge based on their consumer-brand relationship strength and received webcare. The authors introduce inter-failures (i.e. the perceived number of earlier independent service failures that a customer has experienced with the same brand involved in the current service failure) as the central frame condition.

To test our hypotheses, both a scenario-based online experiment (n = 316) and an online survey (n = 492) were conducted.

With an increasing number of inter-failures, online complainants with a high-relationship strength move from the “love is blind” effect (no inter-failures) to the “love becomes hate” effect (multiple inter-failures), when they ultimately become more revengeful than their low-relationship strength counterparts. In addition, the authors show that in the case of no or few inter-failures, accommodative webcare has a lasting positive effect over no/defensive webcare for both low- and high-relationship complainants. More importantly, however, when consumers have experienced multiple inter-failures, accommodative webcare becomes ineffective (for low-relationship complainants) or boomerangs by cultivating revenge towards the brand (among high-relationship complainants), but not strategic avoidance.

The findings have pronounced implications for the literature on customer–brand relationships following service failures and the literature, which predominantly emphasizes the unconditionally positive effects of accommodative webcare.

This study is the first that simultaneously considers the prior customer–brand relationship, inter-failures and webcare to explain online complainants' revenge.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on failures in online flash sales (OFS) and to explore why consumers participate in an OFS even after experiencing service failure. It also examines the role of deal proneness, attribution, and emotions.

Using a mixed method approach to gain insights into this relatively unexplored phenomenon of OFS, this research uses netnography followed by a survey study.

The findings show that deal-prone customers tend to ignore service failures during OFS and re-participate in the future. In the context of OFS, failures attributed to internal locus of attribution (LOA) also have a negative effect on re-participation compared with failures attributed to external LOA. Furthermore, there is a three-way interaction among deal proneness, LOA, and past emotions. The results show that negative past emotions further exacerbate the impact of attribution on the link between deal proneness and re-participation.

In contrast with prior research, the paper shows that consumers participate even after service failure. The proposed difference is between customers who experience different LOA and past emotions offers insights into their behavior after service failure in a new context of an online/electronic commerce event – flash sales. This paper specifically explores the role of internal LOA and finds that it has a more negative impact than external LOA on re-participation.

The purpose of this paper is to test if the order in which potential customers receive company related information and product related information about a new brand can influence their trust and purchase intentions towards that brand. The empirical context is when both product and company are new to a market and share a brand name.

Two experiments, each involving a different product type, are used to test whether higher trust and purchase intentions towards a new brand are likely when company related information is provided first compared to when product related information is provided first.

Company related information is more diagnostic than product related information and carries more weight in initial consumer trust judgements particularly when it is evaluated first. There is a similar primacy effect on purchase intentions but one mediated by initial trust. The effect is more pronounced for product types that involve a higher perceived risk when buying.

This paper adds to our understanding of the respective roles of corporate and product communication in the process of brand trust formation for newly launched brands by evidencing and explaining primacy effects related to the greater diagnosticity of corporate brand information.

Market entrants should communicate information about their company before promoting their products.

While prior work has shown that both company and product related information can influence customers’ trust towards a new brand, there has been no assessment of the benefits from ordering these communications. The focus here is then on the processes involved in brand trust formation, rather than on identifying specific antecedents of brand trust.

The purpose of this paper is to use an attributional approach to examine press coverage in Germany dealing with Toyota’s 2010 global product recall due to purportedly defective brakes. The research focuses on the attributions of cause and responsibility and, thereby, the practices of media-brokered selection and interpretation of events.

The methodology used is a quantitative content analysis of selected German print media. Corporate reporting is analysed with the help of attribution theory approaches from the field of psychology, which, when applied to public relations themes, thereby enables the identification of latent and manifest risk factors that emerge from the perceived responsibility of the media.

Causal attributions are an essential aspect of coverage in acute crisis situations. The key findings show a dominance of internal attributions of responsibility in which the media interprets the crisis as self inflicted and ascribes a high level of fault on the company. Exonerating attributions according to a self-serving bias find little resonance in the coverage. The responsibility attributed to Toyota by the media coverage to a sustained damage to the company’s reputation.

The study demonstrates that attribution theory can be productively applied to questions of communication management. This approach enables an analysis of attribution discourse as well as the potential long-term effects on the company’s reputation. Thus, the original value of this study lies in the psychological foundation of organisational risk and opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to study the usage of ethical business strategies, in particular those using the corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach, of Egyptian businesses. The authors primarily focus on one facet of CSR strategy – cause-related marketing (CRM) – which has been increasingly used by marketing practitioners in recent times.

In the context of Egyptian household goods business, the authors investigate the factors that motivate/hinder consumer participation in their CRM campaigns using a sample of 261 respondents in a mixed research design.

Results show that motivational attribution significantly predicts consumers’ responses toward CRM, with moral judgment playing a partial mediating role in such relationship. In addition, several variables such as altruism and religiosity among personality characteristics are found to arouse consumers’ positive motivational attribution, whereas skepticism was negatively associated with CRM responses.

The findings of this research have both practical and social implications for academics and practitioners alike. Successful campaigns should include the factors inducing motivational attribution, which, in turn, enhances consumers’ attitude toward a company and their purchase intentions. Personal characteristics also impact consumer responses and should be paid attention to.

In a world characterized by fast-changing pace of globalization, it has become critical to study an important phenomenon like CRM in the Middle East, and this original research provides insights into how effective CRM campaigns can be developed there. This will strengthen our cross-cultural understanding of the similarities and differences in consumer viewpoints between developed and developing countries.

Product harm crises are becoming increasingly common, and recent examples include Toyota and Vioxx. This chapter examines country differences that impact consumer blame attributions for an ambiguous product harm crisis, and proposes a framework for a crisis response strategy. The first step involves assessing the level of uncertainty avoidance and crisis severity which serve as an indicator of the urgency felt by consumers to assess blame. The second step involves examining consumer beliefs and information processing biases to determine who consumers will most likely blame in order to resolve the uncertainty. Based on information gathered from these steps, a crisis response strategy is suggested for global brand managers.

The purpose of this paper is to show that culture has differential effects on purchase intent, using respondents from four very different cultural groups within Indonesia, and two different advertisements (one ethical, another unethical).

The study uses survey methods and a highly structured questionnaire to collect data from respondents in four cultural groups. In total, 100 responses were received from each of these groups within Indonesia (Bali, Batak, Java, and Minang). Data were analyzed using partial least squares.

The results suggest that when advertising to culturally conservative groups, caution is required. Such groups have lower purchase intent when they do not like the advertisement. Moreover, other variables such as attitude towards the advertiser may become salient drivers of purchase intent for such groups if the advertisement is perceived to be unethical. Importantly, neither of these factors are salient for more permissive cultures, regardless of whether the advertisement is perceived to be ethical or unethical. In addition the authors identify a set of “universal paths” by which advertisement-related factors, and company-related factors indirectly influence purchase intent for both permissive and conservative cultures, regardless of the perceived ethicality of the advertisement.

The research uses four samples, with 100 respondents per group. Future research could verify these results using larger samples. In addition, the study only uses low involvement consumer products, hence future research could test the model on higher involvement products.

Managers should test their advertising messages on target audiences to assess whether they are likeable, as advertisement likeability can influence purchase intent. In addition, whilst factors such as ethicality (and likeability, and attitude towards the advertiser) tend to not affect purchase intent directly except in specific circumstances, these antecedent variables do have strong effects on each other via the universal paths.

This is the first study which has examined the effects of ethical/unethical advertisements across four different cultures in Indonesia. The results also reveal an important set of relationships between the model variables, which the authors refer to as the “universal paths.” These paths have important implications for advertisers and their clients in their attempts to build brand equity and increase purchase intent.

This study examines the interplay between media-induced emotional crisis framing (anger vs sadness) and message sidedness of crisis response on publics’ attribution of crisis responsibility as well as subsequent company evaluation and supportive behavioral intention.

A 2 (emotion: anger vs sadness) x 2 (crisis response: one-sided vs two-sided) online experiment was conducted among 161 participants in the USA.

Results showed that anger-inducing media framing of the crisis elicited higher levels of crisis responsibility attribution and more negative company evaluation, compared with sadness-inducing media framing. One-sided message response was more effective than two-sided message response in lowering attribution of crisis responsibility when sadness was induced, but no difference was found under the anger-induced condition. Attribution of crisis responsibility fully mediated the effects of emotional crisis framing on company evaluation and supportive behavioral intention toward the company.

This study is among the first to examine the interaction effect between emotional media framing and response message sidedness in an ambiguous crisis. Drawing on the interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, this study integrates the situational crisis communication theory, appraisal-tendency framework and message sidedness in persuasion literature. As such, it contributes to theoretical development in crisis communication and offers communication managers guidance on how to effectively address emotionally framed crises.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the moderating effect of consumer altruistic values upon two drivers of brand credibility in cause‐related marketing (CrM): cause‐brand fit and consumer attribution of altruistic brand motivations.

This is a quantitative study. Data have been collected through personal interviews at households using the random route sampling technique. The sample is formed by consumers of insurance and personal hygiene products, using different brand‐social cause combinations. Data have been analysed through structural equation modelling and multigroup analysis to test the moderation hypotheses.

Findings show that altruistic consumers use mainly altruistic attribution to form their judgement on brand credibility in CrM messages, whereas non altruistic consumers base their assessment on cause‐brand fit.

Real brands have been used in the empirical study and thus further research should replicate the study with fictional brands in order to avoid the effect of consumer prior information.

The findings have relevant implications for CrM campaign managers in helping them to understand how to increase brand credibility in CrM messages. They should emphasize altruistic motivations if their target comprises more altruists or brand‐cause fit if non‐altruists outweigh.

This study contributes to the literature by making explicit the moderating role of altruistic values on two antecedents of brand credibility (cause‐brand fit and altruistic attributions) in a CrM campaign.