Powering Sustainable Consumption: The Roles of Green Consumption Values and Power Distance Belief

Abstract

As human consumption is one of the key contributors to environmental problems, it is increasingly urgent to promote sustainable consumption. Drawing on the agentic-communal model of power, this research explores how the psychological feeling of power influences consumers' preference for green products. We show that low power increases consumers' preference for green (vs. conventional) products compared to high power (Studies 1a and 1b).Importantly, we identify two factors moderating the main effect of power on green consumption.Specifically, we find that the effect of power on green consumption is more salient among those with high green consumption values (Study 2). In addition, the effects of power are dynamic as a function of power distance belief (PDB), such that low power (vs. high power) promotes green consumption in the low-PDB context while high power (vs. low power) promotes green consumption in the high-PDB context (Study 3). Taken together, these findings provide novel insights into understanding green consumption from the perspectives of social power, green values, and PDB. Besides contributing to the literature, the findings have significant implications for marketers and policy-makers in promoting green campaigns, bridging the attitude-behavior gap, and building a more sustainable society.

Sustaining brand loyalty: The moderating role of green consumption values

“…Lastly, Yoo and Donthu's (2001) scale was applied to test BL. This scale has been used in previous studies (Larson, 2019; Yan et al, 2019; Cruz‐Cárdenas et al, 2019) providing adequate Cronbach alpha values (.87, .93 and .84, respectively). All scales items with relevant mean scores and standard deviations are presented in Table 2.…”

Does social influence turn pessimistic consumers green?

“…This study focuses on organic food consumption, which is defined as the consumption of foods that are organically grown. The focus of the current study is on “consumption behavior” rather than “purchase intention” as several scholars (Sharma et al, 2020; Yan et al, 2021) have argued that there exists an intention‐behavior gap in the green marketing context.…”

The Research Agenda of Green Education in Enhancing Environmental Concern and Green Consumption

“…For instance, an exploration of proenvironment intentions from the aspect of self-identity (Lalot et al, 2019), the consequences of environmental practice, concerns, and image on willingness to pay premium price (Gonzalez-Rodriguez, 2020), and green experience value, trust, and customer-brand relationship (Gupta et al, 2019). Other studies have overarched green purchase behavior from the perspective of value attitude-behavior model (Cheung and To, 2019), biospheric value, green trust, theory of planned behavior on willingness to pay a premium price, and behavior intention (Yadaf et al, 2019), and value, belief, and preference for the green product (Yan et al, 2019). Considering the exploration of prior research, the topic of environment knowledge, consciousness, as well as environment concerned or people attitude and behavior to care the environments are still neglected (see Tonder et al, 2020;Issock et al, 2020;Xu and Jeong, 2019;Nguyen and Nguyen, 2020;Han et al, 2020).…”