مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد توانمند سازی روانشناختی در رفتار مصرف کننده محافظ اقلیمی – امرالد 2017

Addressing global sustainability issues such as climate change requires concerted group action. As a consequence, the motivation of most consumers to engage individually in sustainable consumer behaviour such as energy conservation, limiting car use or switching to green electricity is very limited. Proenvironmental behaviour requires sacrifices and causes individual costs but short- or medium-term benefits are generally lacking. The individual contribution of any consumer does not make a significant impact on the overall state of the environment. Most consumers experience a feeling of disempowerment with respect to global environmental problems which poses a significant limitation to tackling climate change (Barr et al., 2011). This research addresses the question whether psychological empowerment, that is, the subjective feeling of empowerment, can explain differences in individual motivation to engage in proenvironmental climate-protective consumer behaviour. Can the subjective feeling to actually have “an impact on what happens”, to have “the power to change things”, motivate consumers to do more for the environment? The concept of psychological empowerment has been previously studied from a social psychology and organizational perspective (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Siegall and Gardner, 2000; Spreitzer, 1995; Spreitzer et al., 1999; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990; Seibert et al., 2011). Consumer empowerment constitutes an emerging concept in the marketing literature (Wathieu et al., 2002; Wright et al., 2006). Psychological consumer empowerment refers to consumers’ perceived influence on product design and organizational decisionmaking (Füller et al., 2009). Indeed, recent research has linked growing consumer power and first line employees’ psychological empowerment (Yoo, 2017). Increasing perceived customer empowerment has been found to enhance corporate attitudes and purchase intention (Fuchs and Schreier, 2011; Fuchs et al., 2010). Psychological consumer empowerment has also been proposed as a motivational factor in proenvironmental consumer behaviour (Geller, 1995; McGregor, 2005; Spaargaren and Mol, 2008; Spaargaren and Oosterveer, 2010; Thøgersen, 2005). However, so far, the literature on the role of psychological empowerment in sustainable consumption has been scarce, and, in particular, there has been no prior empirical study on this issue (Leonidou and Leonidou, 2011). At the same time, also green marketing practitioners tend to ignore the potential motivating role of feelings of empowerment (Leonidou et al., 2011; Herbes and Ramme, 2014). The present research makes two contributions addressing this gap in the literature. First, a theoretical framework is developed which integrates psychological empowerment into the popular value-belief-norm (VBN) model explaining proenvironmental behaviour (Stern et al., 1999; Stern, 2000). VBN theory postulates that personal norms (PN), as part of a sequential order of different variables and effects, determine proenvironmental behaviour intentions. In this research, psychological empowerment is proposed to moderate the effects of PN on climate-protective consumer behaviour. For consumers feeling empowered, the effect of PN on proenvironmental intentions should be stronger than for individuals lacking psychological empowerment.