Warmth, Competence, and Willingness to Donate: How Perceptions of Partner Organizations Affect Support of Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives in Professional Sport

To enact corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, sport organizations often partner with organizations in different sectors, including public, private, and nonprofit. These partnerships provide teams and leagues with needed resources to effectively execute social initiatives. Little is known, however, about sport organizations’ partnership portfolios and the effectiveness of combining partnerships to improve cause outcomes. Using two experimental studies, we examine perceptions of partnership organizations in terms of warmth and competence, how these combined perceptions in a portfolio affect individuals’ willingness to donate to CSR initiatives, and whether portfolio perceptions can be improved by articulation. We find that perceptions of portfolio warmth and competence increased willingness to donate to sport organizations’ CSR initiatives through the serial mediation effects of cause fit and response efficacy in the structural equation model. Furthermore, we find that corporate competence articulation reduced the mediation effect of response efficacy in the structural relationship.