Exploring customers' situational and word-of-mouth motivations in corporate misconduct

The purpose of this study was to understand customers' motivations in engaging in information forwarding and negative word-of-mouth behaviors in light of alleged corporate misconduct. To do so, an online survey was conducted in Singapore using alleged workplace gender discrimination as the corporate misconduct (N = 461). Situational motivation in problem solving was found not only to predict customers' issue-specific information forwarding behaviors, but also to predict their word-of-mouth motivations. However, only four of the tested WOM motivations were found to influence negative WOM, and outrage was found neither to impact WOM motivations nor behaviors. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.