Exploring the Outcomes of Customer Engagement in DSR: The Role of Affective Commitment and Gamification Affordance

Abstract

Embedding gamified charity into digital social responsibility (DSR) programs has stimulated customers to behave in prosocial and pro-environment ways in daily life. Prior studies on customer outcomes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have yielded fragmented findings in an offline environment. To reap the maximum returns of DSR, this study deconstructs sustainable customer engagement outcomes of DSR into external outcomes, including customer citizenship behavior, and internal outcomes, such as customers’ intention to continue. Moreover, this study examined the role of affective commitment and gamification affordance within a single framework of customer response to DSR. The findings of an empirical study carried out in the DSR programs prove that the underlying psychological mechanisms between customer engagement in DSR and various customer outcomes are mediated by affective commitment and moderated by gamification affordance. This study contributes to the DSR stream of sustainable engagement outcomes by proposing a theoretical framework to clearly understand the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions influencing the customer response to DSR.