Title
Impact of Consumer Stressors on Impulsive Buying Behavior with Consumer Emotional Intelligence as the Moderator of the mediating Role of Stress: A Moderated-Mediation Model
Abstract
Purpose- This study was aimed to find out the impact of psychosocial stressors on impulsive buying through the mechanism of stress. In addition to this it was also aimed that what part consumer emotional intelligence plays in this relationship, does it help consumers in controlling their stress and urges to avoid impulsive buying or not.
Research Design/Methodology- This study has been conducted in the geographical area of Pakistan where consumers were contacted in their natural shopping environment. Almost all the provinces were targeted for response collection. Their education level was taken into consideration so that they could be easily able to fill out the survey questionnaires, in addition to this they were asked that throughout in their life have they acted impulsively or not. If their answer was, yes they were asked to fill in the questionnaire. The new process macro was used to analyze data through regression which was collected from the consumers. This process helped us in finding out the main effect relations along with mediated and moderated mediated relations. The moderated mediation analysis gave us effects of moderating variable at three different levels i-e low, medium and high.
Findings- The findings mostly supported the hypothesis made with a few exceptions. Psychosocial stressors like interpersonal influence, bullying, social comparison and interdependent self construal were found significantly associated with impulsive buying. Surprisingly bullying was not associated with stress, while other psychosocial stressors clearly depicted their stress causing ability. Interdependent self construal based on literature was negatively associated with impulsive buying behavior but in our research the association was found to be positive, which suggest that stress can overtake the original impact of interdependent self construal available in the literature.
Originality/Value- Findings of the study have great implications for psychologist, marketing researchers and practitioners who could help stressful consumers, push them to develop alternative mechanisms to handle the problem or engage them into coping mechanisms relevant to impulsive buying.