From fury to forgiveness: Exploring the mediating role of emotions in the relationship between crisis type, corporate social responsibility fit, and organizational outcomes

Abstract

This study investigates how three types of emotions (anger, affective empathy, and cognitive empathy) mediate the relationship between crisis type and corporate social responsibility (CSR) fit and organizational outcomes such as purchase intentions, negative word-of-mouth (nwom), organizational reputation, as well as forgiveness. An online 2 (crisis type: product-harm vs. moral-harm) x 2 (CSR fit: high fit vs. low fit) between-subjects design (N = 412) was conducted with the participants recruited via CloudResearch, a crowdsourcing platform. The findings indicate that anger significantly mediates the relationship between crisis \type and crisis outcomes, with product-harm crises increasing anger and leading to more negative outcomes. Conversely, high CSR fit reduces anger and enhances positive organizational outcomes. Affective empathy also mediates these relationships, with product-harm crises lowering affective empathy and CSR fit improving it, subsequently influencing purchase intentions, reputation, forgiveness, and negative word-of-mouth. Cognitive empathy partially mediates these effects, particularly affecting negative word-of-mouth, reputation, and forgiveness. These results suggest that managing stakeholder emotions through CSR alignment can effectively mitigate negative impacts during crises. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.