Sustainable Banking Through Corporate Social Responsibility: Financial and Emotional Pathways of Customer Perceptions—Evidence from Ankara, the Capital of Turkey

In the context of sustainable banking, this study examines the relationships between customers’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR), their evaluations of a bank’s financial performance, and the positive and negative emotions they associate with a bank, underscoring the importance of managing customer psychology. The dataset consists of 426 completed questionnaires collected from private bank customers in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. SPSS 24.0 was used for data entry, and SPSS and AMOS 24.0 were employed for statistical analyses. The analytical procedures included preliminary analyses, confirmatory factor analysis, Harman’s single-factor test, common latent factor analysis, internal consistency, composite reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, Pearson correlation analysis, structural equation modeling, the Sobel test, and a bootstrap method with 5000 resamples. The findings indicate that customers’ perceptions of CSR have a significant and positive direct effect on their perceptions of a bank’s financial performance. In turn, perceived financial performance positively influences customers’ positive emotions and negatively influences their negative emotions. Moreover, perceptions of CSR affect emotional responses both directly and indirectly through perceived financial performance, enhancing positive emotions and reducing negative ones. In conclusion, within the proposed model, perceived financial performance functions as a partial mediating variable between CSR perceptions and customer emotions. These findings advance CSR scholarship by mapping its financial and emotional impact pathways in banking, yielding strategic insights for practitioners.