Trust Repair Strategies Following Greenwashing: An Experimental Study of Organizational Trustworthiness in Pakistan’s Home Appliance Sector
Abstract
Greenwashing, deceptive or misleading environmental claims by organizations, has emerged as a critical threat to consumer trust, particularly in Pakistan's rapidly expanding home appliance sector. Despite considerable scholarly attention to trust violations, the mechanisms through which organizations can systematically restore consumer trust following greenwashing incidents remain underexplored, especially in developing-country contexts. This study employs a pretest–posttest control group experimental design (N = 300) to investigate whether affective, informational, and functional trust repair strategies significantly improve consumer perceptions of organizational integrity, benevolence, and competence. Participants drawn from three universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, were randomly assigned to either a high-trust repair condition (multimodal comprehensive recovery stimuli) or a low-trust repair condition (minimal recovery stimuli), following exposure to a standardized greenwashing violation scenario involving a fictitious home appliance firm. One-way ANOVA results reveal statistically significant differences across all three trustworthiness dimensions: organizational integrity (F = 12.34, p < .001), benevolence (F = 14.56, p < .001), and competence (F = 13.29, p < .001), with the high-trust repair group consistently recording higher mean scores. These findings, grounded in Social Exchange Theory, demonstrate that comprehensive, multi-dimensional trust repair strategies restore consumer perceptions of organizational trustworthiness more effectively than minimal repair efforts. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed, along with directions for future research.
Keywords: greenwashing, trust repair, affective strategies, informational strategies, functional strategies, organizational trustworthiness, consumer behavior, Pakistan, home appliances, experimental design
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21138202
