مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The value of considering employees’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes is increasingly recognized as an important yet understudied stream in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). Advances in this line of inquiry have been made in identifying positive employee-level outcomes of their employers’ CSR initiatives (e.g., Carmeli, Gilat, & Waldman, 2007; Evans, Goodman, & Davis, 2011; Maignan, Ferrell, & Hult, 1999) supporting the theory that employees respond favorably to their employers’ engagement in CSR. Two fundamental findings of micro-level research on CSR are that individuals will reward organizations who engage in CSR, and more recently, that the attributions made of the motives underlying these CSR initiatives play a key role in these responses (Marin, Cuestas, & Roman, 2015). This paper contributes to and expands the current understanding of employee-level effects of CSR while accounting for the growing cynicism of observers toward organizational motivations underlying these initiatives. The increasingly common judgment of organization actions as greenwashing suggests the importance of disentangling organizational engagement in CSR from the attributions of these initiatives. The question when it comes to employee outcomes is no longer “whether CSR pays, but instead when or under what circumstances” (Orlitzky, Siegel, & Waldman, 2011, p.9), recognizing that CSR increasingly becomes expected of and enacted to varying degrees and for varying reasons by organizations. We integrate theoretical and empirical work in the organizational behavior (OB), marketing, and strategy literature to propose a model identifying key factors underlying employees’ varying attributions of their organizations’ CSR initiatives, and their ensuing attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

The recent and growing interest in the impact of CSR on employees in the OB literature has focused on positive individual attitudes and behaviors resulting from an organization’s engagement in CSR initiatives. For example, a positive link has been established between the extent to which an organization engages in CSR and organizational identification (Carmeli et al., 2007), individual and group commitment to the organization (Brammer, Millington, & Rayton, 2007; Chun, Shin, Choi, & Kim, 2011; Ditlev-Simonsen,2015; Glavas & Kelley, 2014; Maignan & Ferrell, 2001; Maignan et al., 1999; Peterson, 2004; Stites & Michael, 2011), in-role and extra-role performance (Story & Neves, 2015) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs; Evans et al., 2011; Hansen, Dunford, Boss, Boss, & Angermeier, 2011; Lin, Lyau, Tsai, Chen, & Chiu, 2010; Rupp, Shao, Thornton, & Skarlicki, 2013). While corporate misdeeds or irresponsibility have been shown to lead to null or negative individual-level outcomes (Rupp et al., 2013), the dominant assumption regarding organizational engagement in CSR has been that this produces favorable employee outcomes.

In line with growing societal skepticism over organizations’ publicized CSR initiatives (e.g. Chun & Giebelhausen, 2012; Jahdi & Acikdilli, 2009; Skarmeas & Leonidou, 2013), we argue the importance of employees’ attributions of their organizations’ motives for engaging in CSR as key to understanding their ensuing attitudes and behaviors at work. Two-dimensional organizational motivations underlying CSR initiatives have been accounted for in the strategy (e.g. substantive vs. symbolic; Godfrey, 2005) and marketing (e.g. internal vs. external, Vlachos, Epitropaki, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2013; proactive vs. reactive Groza, Pronschinske, & Walker, 2011; and intrinsic vs. extrinsic, Pai, Lai, Chiu, & Yong, 2015; Vlachos, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2013) literature as well as in the popular vernacular (e.g. greening vs. greenwashing). While a number of organizational motives have been considered, a common thread and broad distinction is that made between CSR mainly motivated by a desire to help its target (other-serving), versus CSR driven with the goal of benefitting the organization (self-serving; from here on referred to as substantive vs. symbolic, respectively). It is important to note that while actual organizational motivations (i.e. in the strategy and OB literature) and attributions of these motivations (i.e. in the marketing literature) have been addressed, our focus is on the latter.