Introduction

This paper reports on how positive emotions and feelings generated by an organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) perceptions can lead to positive influence on employee attitude (creative process engagement (CPE)) and employee behavior (creativity). Drawing on the affective events theory (AET), this study investigates and explains how antecedents and consequences of affective experiences at work will have explanatory role to the relationship between internal CSR (i.e. CSR activities directed toward internal stakeholder such as employee groups) and employee creativity. AET proposes that work environment characteristics influence the occurrence of certain events. These events, in turn, stimulate different affective reactions and thus influence employee work behaviors (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Over the past decade, many studies have been conducted to discern the relationship between an organization’s CSR perceptions and employee outcomes such as job satisfaction (e.g. Barakat et al., 2016; Glavas and Kelley, 2014), organizational commitment (Kim et al., 2010), and citizenship behaviors (e.g. Gao and He, 2017). Most of these investigations found that CSR perceptions were positively associated with employee outcomes. Furthermore, some studies analyzed the process through which an organization’s CSR perceptions evoke positive employee outcomes. These studies had exclusively relied on mechanisms such as employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ justice and employee identification (e.g. De Roeck et al., 2014) and their attitudes toward them (e.g. organizational trust; Wang et al., 2013). Most recently, De Roeck et al. (2016) found that CSR perceptions interact with overall justice to predict organizational identification through the mediation of perceived external prestige and organizational pride. Based on the literature review conducted for the current study, there are only a few conceptual frameworks had been used by researchers to explain the relationship between organization’s CSR perceptions and employee attitudes and behaviors. Glavas and Kelley (2014) highlighted that the gab exists in the literature in regards to the association between CSR and employee work outcomes, and encouraged researchers to clarify some of the mechanisms that make this association possible. However, even though CSR is believed to lead to positive affective experiences (Moon et al., 2014), very little attention has been given to affect-based theories as a theoretical mechanism to understand the positive association between CSR perceptions and employee outcomes. Consequently, the current study aims to fill this gap by adopting AET as a theoretical framework that could explain the relationship between CSR perceptions and employee creative behaviors. Moreover, most of CSR studies were western centered. Having said this, little is known about how CSR is implicated and instantiated in less developed countries (LDCs) like Egypt. Hence, CSR literature in western context offers rich insights into how CSR evokes positive employee outcomes (e.g. Ditlev-Simonsen, 2015; Hofman and Newman, 2014; De Roeck and Delobbe, 2012; De Roeck et al., 2014; Stites and Michael, 2011), it is somewhat surprising to see that little attention has been paid to studying CSR in LDCs.