Five decades of self-congruity in consumer behaviour research: A systematic review and future research agenda

Abstract

The conceptualization of self-congruity is more than five decades old. However, the research on its effect on consumer behaviour is still evolving, ensuing the literature developed being fragmented and dispersed. This concern state-of-art summarization of the literature to consolidate knowledge on self-congruity. The purpose of this review article is to structure the self-congruity literature on understanding consumer behaviour developed over five decades in terms of significant theories, contexts, frameworks, and methodologies. This review also aims to provide an integrative research model and outline future research directions. To this end, Scientific procedure and rationales for systematic literature reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) protocol with the lens of the Theory, Context, Characteristics, Methods (TCCM) framework was adopted for review procedure. The review was conducted with a corpus containing 339 research articles on exploring self-congruity facets and its effect on consumer behaviour published between 1973 and 2022. The findings are reported using TCCM convention adopting inductive approach. Further, based on the review findings, an integrative model of self-congruity is put forth summarizing the research frameworks and constructs adopted as antecedents, modifiers, and implications in investigating self-congruity effect on consumer behaviour. This review paper concludes recommending future research agendas with the intention of expanding self-congruity research in emerging contexts applying cutting-edge methodology.