Courageous Role Model or Threatening Villain: A Parallel Mediation Model of Corporate Activism and Citizen Political Engagement
研究企业通过社会政治行动呼吁公民参与政治时，如何因公民政治立场不同而引发支持或反弹，并通过实验验证了先行行动可减少威胁感。
Through their sociopolitical activism, business leaders increasingly call for citizens to become more politically engaged in favor of a partisan position. This research develops and tests a framework that reveals that corporate sociopolitical activism can indeed elicit such political engagement but runs the risk of simultaneously inciting backlash from citizens who oppose the company’s envisioned political ends. Whereas politically congruent citizens perceive a company’s activism to be morally courageous and are thus inspired to support the company’s stance, politically incongruent citizens feel threatened by the company’s activism and become politically engaged in protection of their political identity. Companies may, however, succeed in increasing moral courage attributions without simultaneously affecting citizens’ political identity threat by acting as first movers in their activism. A series of experiments, including a stimulus sampling approach with 30 real cases of corporate sociopolitical activism, lend support for this framework. The results provide several implications for the political responsibilities of business leaders in contemporary democracies.