The Impact of Mixed Emotions on Consumer Improvisation Behavior in the Environment of COVID-19: The Moderating Effect of Tightness-Looseness Culture

Xiaozhi Huang (), Xiaojie Zhang and Heng Zhang
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Xiaozhi Huang: School of Business, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Xiaojie Zhang: School of Business, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Heng Zhang: School of Management, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 24, 1-21

Abstract: Organizations and individuals are unprepared for an unexpected outbreak of COVID-19. While most of the literature focuses on improvised reactions at the organizational level, this paper focuses on understanding improvised reactions at the individual level. This paper draws on previous research applying improvisation to the field of consumer behavior and introduces consumer knowledge acquisition as a mediating variable and tightness-looseness culture as a moderating variable from the perspective of mixed emotions of awe and anxiety to explain the mechanism of consumers with mixed emotions of awe and anxiety on improvisation behavior based on the environment of a COVID-19 outbreak. Data from 330 participants in Study 1 examined the effect of mixed emotions of awe and anxiety on improvisation behavior through knowledge acquisition, and data from 434 participants in Study 2 examined the moderating effect of relaxed culture. The findings suggest that consumers with mixed emotions report a higher willingness to acquire knowledge and report higher levels of improvisational behavior. Consumers behaved differently in different environments. Consumers with mixed emotions responded more strongly to improvisation in the loose-culture environment than in the tight-culture environment, and the mixed emotions of awe and anxiety had a positive effect on individual consumers’ improvisational behavior through the mediating role of knowledge acquisition.

Keywords: awe; mixed emotion; knowledge acquisition; tightness-looseness culture; consumer improvised behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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