Consumers’ continuance intention for participation in virtual corporate social responsibility cocreation activities: Self-construal and flow

We conducted 2 experiments in which we explored the influence mechanism of consumers’ beliefs about both corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social responsibility–corporate ability (CSR–CA) on their continuance intention for participation in virtual CSR cocreation activities. We recruited 115 participants in Experiment 1. The results show that CSR–CA beliefs effectively decreased consumers’ intention to continue participating in virtual CSR, which was affected by consumers’ self-construal. Specifically, for consumers with an independent self-construal, there was a significant correlation between their CSR–CA beliefs and participation continuance intention; however, the correlation between these variables was not significant for consumers with an interdependent self-construal. The Experiment 2 sample comprised 171 participants and the results show that the interaction effect between self-construal and CSR–CA beliefs was mediated by flow. Thus, we recommend that marketers design CSR activities to activate an interdependent self-construal and enhance consumers’ flow, which will increase their continuance intention.