Considering the vulnerable climatic conditions in most parts of the planet, a successful transition toward a carbon-free future is a critical challenge worldwide. In this respect, around 35% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emission is associated with the power sector. To this end, a vast of electrical energy has been used by the people in buildings. Specifically, a significant amount of energy in buildings is used for heating, cooling, and ventilation. While the available literature highlights the importance of neat, (...) clean, and green electrical energy for the decarbonization of society, a critical gap exists in such literature. That is, most of the literature under this stream deals with the supply side of electrical energy, while the demand side was neglected. To bridge this critical knowledge gap, this study investigates how the CSR engagement of a hotel organization can promote the energy-related pro-environmental behavior among the employees with the intervening effect of employees’ environmental commitment and Green intrinsic motivation. Further, the conditional indirect role of altruistic values was also tested in this study. The data were collected from different hotel employees in Pakistan with the help of a self-administered questionnaire. We tested the hypothesized relationship through structural equation modeling. The results confirmed that CSR can be a potential motivator to impact the ERPEB of employees, while EMEC and GRIM mediated this relationship significantly. The findings of this study also confirmed the conditional indirect role of altruistic values. These findings offer various theoretical and practical contributions which are conversed in detail. (shrink)

Drawing from the stimulus-organism-response model, this study examines how and under what circumstances perceived environmental corporate social responsibility affects innovative behavior of employees in the context of environmental protection. Using a sample of 398 employees from different firms in the high energy-consuming industry of China, the results indicate that, at first, perceived ECSR provides a positive effect on organizational identification. Secondly, organizational identification has a positive influence on the innovative behavior of employees. Thirdly, organizational identification plays an important mediating effect (...) between perceived ECSR and the innovative behavior of employees. Fourthly, both the effect of perceived ECSR on organizational identification and the indirect effect of perceived ECSR on the innovative behavior of the employees via organizational identification will be stronger when the levels of organizational trust are high. These findings add new insights into the perceived ECSR-employees’ innovative behavior relationship and provide important managerial implications for enhancing ECSR perception to improve the innovative behavior of employees. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

In this study, we examine whether, how, and when corporate social responsibility increases promotive and prohibitive voices in accordance with ethical climate theory and multi-experience model of ethical climate. Data from 382 employees at two time points are examined. Results show that CSR is positively related to promotive and prohibitive voices. Other-focused and self-focused climates mediate the relationship between CSR and the two types of voice. Moreover, humble leadership moderates the positive relationship between CSR and other-focused climate. Such leadership moderates (...) the negative relationship between CSR and self-focused climate. Humble leadership also moderates the indirect effect between CSR and the two kinds of voice through other-focused and self-focused climates. The findings of this study provide important insights into how and when CSR influences employee voice. (shrink)

Interest in the microfoundations of corporate social responsibility has grown over the past decade. In this study, we draw on social learning theory to examine the effects of prosocial leaders on followers’ motivation to engage in CSR practices, and consequently on their CSR performance. Further drawing from social learning theory, we propose that followers’ trait compliance and leader-member exchange moderate the above relationships by affecting the conceptual mechanisms of social rewards and role-modeling motives. We tested our hypotheses with data from (...) a sample of 138 employees who were responsible for implementing an organization-initiated CSR practice. Our results showed that among followers who were high in trait compliance, leaders’ prosocial motivation was positively associated with followers' CSR motivation. In addition, followers’ CSR motivation was positively related to their objective CSR performance when they had a high-quality relationship with their leaders. Our findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which leaders will be more versus less influential on followers’ motivation and engagement in CSR activities. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results. (shrink)

This research merges literature from organizational behavior and marketing to garner insight into how organizations can maximize the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility for enhanced CSR and organizational engagement of employees. Across two field experiments, the authors demonstrate that the effectiveness of employee co-creation activities in increasing employees’ positive CSR perceptions is moderated by self-construal. In particular, the positive effect of co-creation on CSR perceptions emerges only for employees with a salient interdependent self-construal. Moreover, the results demonstrate that increased positive (...) CSR perceptions then predict increased CSR engagement and organizational engagement. The research thus highlights the need to consider self-construal when trying to utilize co-creation to predict CSR engagement and organizational engagement, via CSR perceptions. (shrink)

Most studies of corporate social responsibility have focused on the organisational level, while the individual level of analysis has been treated as a ‘black box’ when researching antecedents of CSR engagement or disengagement. This article offers insights into a small and medium-sized enterprise that is recognised as a pioneer in CSR. Although the extant literature suggests that the owner-manager is crucial in the implementation of CSR, this study reveals that employees drive CSR. The employees in the focal firm voluntarily joined (...) forces based on their shared perception of moral responsibility for CSR and they developed strict targets to be achieved by 2030. Despite their strong ethical and moral perspective when enacting CSR, they disengaged from their moral responsibility for CSR in various contexts. This paper contributes to the theory of moral decoupling by uncovering a novel context of disengagement—‘visionary procrastination’. Visionary procrastination is suggested to be a particularly relevant context of disengagement when individuals perceive moral responsibility for CSR. Moreover, by delivering insights into the antecedents of employee-initiated CSR on the organisational level, this study adds to the growing body of literature on the micro-foundations of CSR. (shrink)

Extant research provides compelling conceptual and empirical arguments that company-external as well as company-internal CSR efforts positively affect employees, but does so largely in studies assessing effects from the two CSR types independently of each other. In contrast, this paper investigates external–internal CSR jointly, examining the effects of consistent external–internal CSR strategies on employee attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. The research takes a social and moral identification theory view and advances the core hypothesis that inconsistent CSR strategies, defined as favoring external (...) over internal stakeholders, trigger employees’ perceptions of corporate hypocrisy which, in turn, lead to emotional exhaustion and turnover. In Study 1, a cross-industry employee survey indicates that inconsistent CSR strategies with larger external than internal efforts increase employees’ turnover intentions via perceived corporate hypocrisy and emotional exhaustion. In Study 2, a multi-source secondary dataset demonstrates that inconsistent CSR strategies increase firms’ actual employee turnover. Combined, the two studies demonstrate the importance of taking into account the interests of both external and internal stakeholders of the firm when researching and managing CSR. (shrink)

This study investigates the connection between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation among the public using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). To examine complex processes underlying the reactions of this influential stakeholder group, hypotheses are drawn from the category diagnosticity approach. Thereby, a psychological model of perceived (im)morality is transferred to the CSR context. In line with these hypotheses, positive/negative CSR activities influence reputation in the expected directions (H1a, b), while the effects of specific configurations of CSR activities (...) reveal an asymmetry suggesting a negativity bias (H2). Further analyses confirm that positive effects require a consistent positive performance regarding prior reputations (H3a) and the aggregated CSR activities of several previous years (H3b, c). Moreover, the relevant patterns vary between industries (H4). The present study thus contributes to CSR research by investigating a powerful but hitherto understudied stakeholder group through a category diagnosticity lens combined with a configurational approach to analysis. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

This study examines how individual members of the public make moral sense of the potentially conflicting “economic problem” or “public health problem” representations of the COVID-19 crisis when judging responsible business behavior. The data are based on a qualitative survey involving a thought experiment with 119 participants in the United States conducted at the initial stage of the pandemic. This article proposes a typology matrix using the theories of cognitive polyphasia and cognitive dissonance to understand better individual moral sensemaking of (...) responsible business behavior in the context of a societal paradox in which there are contradictory and interdependent demands between important social objectives. The typology, referred to as the 4R Model of Moral Sensemaking of Competing Social Problems, provides insights for how companies may be perceived when responding to competing social problems, expanding the micro-CSR (corporate social responsibility) and paradox literatures. (shrink)

We investigated the significance of an economic crisis for organizations’ ethical behavior, employees’ unethical behavior, and association. To capture the effect of the “2008’ World economic crisis,” we compared the behaviors of organizations and employees’ unethical behavior during a crisis with their behavior in more favorable circumstances before and after the crisis. We used structural equation modeling to analyze answers collected from 2024 employees in Slovenian organizations between 2006 and 2016. The results showed significant growth of organizational engagement in ethical (...) behavior, despite the crisis in the middle of the observed period. The employees’ unethical behavior was significantly less acceptable in crisis compared to before the crisis, while after the crisis, its acceptability increased again, despite not significant. The aggregate sample revealed a significantly negative influence of employee’s unethical behavior on organizations’ ethical behavior that was not significantly different across the considered periods. The research suggests the need to manage the organization’s ethical behavior in times of economic downturn, like in the present COVID 19. Additionally, managers need to devote more attention to prevent employees’ unethical behavior and its influence on organizations’ ethical behavior. (shrink)

Although there is much research on the relationships of corporate social responsibility and employee-related outcomes, a systematic and quantitative integration of research findings is needed to substantiate and broaden our knowledge. A meta-analysis allows the comparison of the relations of different types of CSR on several different outcomes, for example to learn what type of CSR is most important to employees. From a theoretical perspective, social identity theory is the most prominent theoretical approach in CSR research, so we aim to (...) investigate identification as a mediator of the relationship between CSR and employee-related outcomes in a meta-analytical mediation model. This meta-analysis synthesizes research findings on the relationship between employees' perception of CSR (people, planet, and profit) and employee-related outcomes (identification, engagement, organizational attractiveness, turnover (intentions), OCB, commitment, and job satisfaction), thereby distinguishing attitudes and behavior. A total of 143 studies (N= 89,396) were included in the meta-analysis which was conducted according to the methods by Schmidt and Hunter (except of the meta-analytical structural equation model). Mean effect sizes for the relationship between CSR and employee-related attitudes and behaviors were medium-sized to large. For attitudes, the relationships were stronger than for behavior. For specific types of CSR, average effect sizes were large. Identification mediated the relation between CSR and commitment, job satisfaction, and OCB, respectively. Based on our results, we give recommendations concerning the design of CSR initiatives in a way that benefits employees. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is widely established by companies that aim to contribute to society and minimize their negative impact on the environment. In CSR research, employees’ reactions to CSR have extensively been researched. Social identity theory is often used as a theoretical background to explain the relationship between CSR and employee-related outcomes, but until now, a sound empirical examination is lacking, and causality remains unclear. CSR can unfold its effect mainly because of three theoretically important aspects of CSR initiatives, which (...) increase identification, i.e., distinctiveness, prestige, and salience of the out-group. This study examines how far identification can explain the effect of CSR on employees. In an experimental vignette study, CSR was manipulated in three degrees to examine its effects on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. In the vignettes, information on distinctiveness, prestige, and salience of the out-group were presented. Regression analyses showed that CSR significantly predicted commitment and job satisfaction, but not OCB. We found mediation effects of CSR on commitment, job satisfaction, and OCB through identification, but the effect of CSR on identification explained only little variance which indicates additional underlying mechanisms. The applicability of social identity theory for explaining CSR is discussed. Moreover, we discuss further explaining mechanisms. (shrink)

This article aims to investigate the impact of employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility on job embeddedness under the drastic circumstances of coronavirus disease 2019. This study also investigated the role of organizational identification as a psychological mechanism linking employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility to job embeddedness. Survey data were collected from 325 employees in banking industry of China and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results revealed that CSR to employees and organizational identification were positively and (...) significantly related to job embeddedness, while CSR to customers, CSR to government, and CSR to society did not significantly predict job embeddedness. Organizational identification fully mediated the relationship between CSR to customers, CSR to government, CSR to society and job embeddedness, and partially mediated the relationship between CSR to employees and job embeddedness. The results suggest engaging in CSR activities can lead employees to identify themselves with the organization and enhance their embeddedness. The article concludes with several implications for practice and recommendations for future research. (shrink)

Although present research shows that ambitious corporate sustainability objectives improve employee engagement in business organizations, there is scarcity of research showing how employees engage in corporate sustainability objectives and become autonomous sustainability thinkers. We suggest that a strong, individual level of psychological ownership of corporate sustainability is a precondition for the development of sustainability thinking, and examine the factors that influence the emergence of such feelings of ownership. Our qualitative study, based on 29 interviews conducted in seven Finnish local business (...) units from three different technology-oriented multinational enterprises (MNEs), shows that several key factors can have contradictory effects, both strengthening and hindering the routes to psychological ownership of corporate sustainability. While these contradictory effects may potentially lead to confusion among employees, our findings may help managers to avoid pitfalls in developing a more sustainability-oriented organizational culture. Moreover, by applying the theory of psychological ownership, our study contributes to the business sustainability research by providing new theoretical opportunities to understand the process of how individuals may become engaged in enhancing business sustainability. (shrink)

This editorial outlines the articles included in the special thematic symposium on corporate social responsibility and employees and highlights their contributions to the literature. In doing so, it highlights the novel theoretical and empirical insights provided by the articles, how the articles inform and expand the methods and research designs researchers can use to study phenomena in this area, and identifies promising directions for future research.

This study aims to examine how service employees’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility affect their creativity at work and its mediated link through compassion at work and their intrinsic motivation. Working with a sample of 250 hotel employees in South Korea, structural equation modeling is employed to test research hypotheses. The results of this research suggest that employees’ perceptions of CSR are positively related to employee creativity. Second, compassion at work mediated the positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and (...) creativity. Third, employees’ intrinsic motivation also mediated the positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and employee creativity. Finally, the relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and employee creativity is sequentially and fully mediated by compassion at work and their intrinsic motivation. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results and limitations of the study are discussed, and future research directions are suggested. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has been linked with numerous organizational advantages, including recruitment, retention, productivity, and morale, which relate specifically to employees. However, despite specific benefits of CSR relating to employees and their importance as a stakeholder group, it is noteworthy that a lack of attention has been paid to the individual level of analysis with CSR primarily being studied at the organizational level. Both research and practice of CSR have largely treated the individual organization as a “black box,” failing to (...) account for individual differences amongst employees and the resulting variations in antecedents to CSR engagement or disengagement. This is further exacerbated by the tendency in stakeholder theory to homogenize priorities within a single stakeholder group. In response, utilizing case study data drawn from three multinational tourism and hospitality organizations, combined with extensive interview data collected from CSR leaders, industry professionals, engaged, and disengaged employees, this exploratory research produces a finer-grained understanding of employees as a stakeholder group, identifying a number of opportunities and barriers for individual employee engagement in CSR interventions. This research proposes that employees are situated along a spectrum of engagement from actively engaged to actively disengaged. While there are some common drivers of engagement across the entire spectrum of employees, differences also exist depending on the degree to which employees, rather than senior management, support corporate responsibility within their organizations. Key antecedents to CSR engagement that vary depending on employees’ existing level of broader engagement include organizational culture, CSR intervention design, employee CSR perceptions, and the observed benefits of participation. (shrink)

This article examines parallels between the increasing mental burnout and environmental overshoot in the organisational context. The article argues that there is a particular philosophy of management that connects these two phenomena of overshoot and burnout, namely productivism. As there are boundaries in all ecological processes and systems, the productivist aim of having ever more output and growth is deemed absurd. It is proposed that productivity as a management philosophy not only leads to mental ill-health in organisations but also to (...) overshoot in the environment. The article concludes that productivism, which denies the limits in utilisation of humans and other natural resources, fits poorly with circular economy and sustainability. Hence, ecological management should be complemented with a more holistic and processual view of organizations, as well as have an aim of peaceful coexistence between all earthbound objects. This signifies acknowledging and caring for human and non-human needs both now and in future by applying the idea of moderation to production of goods and services. (shrink)

In this longitudinal study, we explore the co-evolution of the cognitive complexity of the CEO of Puma, Jochen Zeitz, and his view and initiatives on sustainability. Our purpose was to explore how the changes in a leader’s mindset relate to his/her views and actions on sustainability. In contrast to previous studies, we adopt an in-depth longitudinal case study approach to capture the role of leaders’ cognitive complexity in the context of corporate sustainability. By understanding the cognitive development of Zeitz as (...) leader of Puma, we provide an important step toward understanding the co-evolution of leaders’ cognitive complexity and proactive corporate sustainability initiatives over time. Our findings show that as he developed a more complex mindset that also included non-business lenses, Zeitz developed a more inclusive understanding of sustainability and adopted proactive initiatives that went beyond business-as-usual. Our study also demonstrates that a longitudinal perspective can offer valuable insights for a better understanding of how individuals and their interactions affect and are affected by an organization’s strategies and performance, in corporate sustainability and beyond. (shrink)

This study attempts to examine the direct impact of corporate social responsibility initiatives on employees’ job performance and the indirect relationships between CSR initiatives on employees’ job performance via industrial relations climate and psychological contract fulfillment. Data were collected from 764 supervisor–subordinate dyads and 271 middle managers from 85 companies. Using a multilevel approach, the results showed that organizational-level CSR was positively related to employees’ job performance. Moreover, the industrial relations climate and psychological contract fulfillment played mediating effects between CSR (...) initiatives and job performance. This study provides novel theoretical evidence for why and how CSR initiatives improve job performance. Theoretical and practical implications for implementing CSR initiatives are discussed. (shrink)

As past research has identified frontline employees as the primary communicators of a company’s CSR, this paper reports on a large-scale quasi-field experiment aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the levers of successful in-store, point-of-sale, CSR communication. In cooperation with a large international retailer, the authors analyzed the effects of varying in-store CSR communication strategies in 48 unique stores, combining data from a customer survey, company records of customers’ real visits and purchases, and interviews with store managers. Taking into (...) account the nested structure of the data, the authors reveal that CSR-related training of frontline employees bestows its favorable effect on customers and customer behavior only if it is accompanied by the store managers’ personal support for CSR. (shrink)

This research investigates the interlinkage between corporate social responsibility and ethical leadership in inducing employees’ socially responsible behaviors. Specifically, building on organizational identification theory and cue consistency theory, we develop and test an integrated moderated mediation framework in which employees’ perception of ethical leadership moderates the mediating mechanism between their perceptions of CSR, organizational identification, and SRBs. The findings highlight the need for consistency between employees’ perceptions of CSR and ethical leadership to foster their propensity to further social good through (...) relationship-building activities with their organization. The results, which largely verify the theoretical framework, contribute to and have implications for both research and practice. (shrink)

The authors aim to explore a better fitting leadership style that is designed for the sustainable era in believing and committing to work for cherishing resources and developing the organization toward a new sustainable direction. This study developed the questionnaire items of the Resource-Dilemma-Handling-Leadership scale, representing a new sustainable era's new leadership style, and then to compare it with the transformational leadership style in order to highlight the importance of RHDL for sustainable development. This study took companies, which have more (...) than 100 employees in Taiwan as research samples. Those companies were selected because they were socially tagged as being operating continuously for more than 20 years and identifying themselves with the operational orientation of social responsibility as their business philosophy and core values for management. A total of 532 valid questionnaires were collected, with a 90.6% valid return rate, and tested with the SEM method. Consistent with the authors' inferences from the literature, the test results suggest that CSR plays the role of full mediator between RDHL and OC. CSR itself is like a sense of responsibility, giving employees a sense of mission, to complete meaningful sustainability-relevant tasks in the organization. RDHL, compared with TL, has a better prediction power on CSR and OC. Theoretically, this study implies that the impact of leadership of the organization on OC in the aspects of sustainable development should be going through the influence of the ELB system in the form of CSR to promote the organization's internal and external organizational CSR performance, with added internal strengthening power from OC. Practically, the new RDHL concepts brought up by this study include the training and enhancement of leadership skills based on the content of the scale items being explored. The new RDHL scale contains a comprehensive description of the spirit of the new sustainable era's leadership style. Also, the future applications of RDHL ideas in the form of human resource development should help the realization of the ideally sustainability behavioral patterns of leaders and employees in the organizations. (shrink)

We bring together social identity and social exchange perspectives to develop and test a moderated mediation model that sheds light on employees’ perceptions regarding the interrelations between an organization’s external and internal CSR initiatives and their job attitudes and work behaviours. This is important because employees’ sensemaking of CSR motives as being either self-focussed or others-focussed can produce meaningful variations in their job satisfaction and the dimensions of organizational commitment. Also, the consolidation of CSR’s underlying psychological mechanisms can advance our (...) understanding of the processes, contingencies, and outcomes of employees’ perceptions of their employing organization’s CSR initiatives. Our findings indicate that of the two orientations, only external CSR is associated with increased levels of employee commitment through the enhancement of job satisfaction. In particular, job satisfaction was found to fully mediate the impact of external CSR on behavioural commitment and partially mediate its impact on attitudinal commitment. To our surprise, internal CSR has no significant association with job attitudes or work behaviours. We further reveal the complementarity of external and internal CSR orientations; the effect of external CSR on employee outcomes is stronger when employed in concert with internal CSR. Our results contribute to and have implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

This study contributes to the growing literature on individual-level outcomes of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Employing a sample of 339 subordinate–supervisor dyads, we explored the differential impact of CSR attributions on employees’ creative performance in the telecom industry. We also introduced and tested the role of psychological safety as a mediator underlying this relationship. The results indicate that although intrinsic CSR attributions are not directly related to creative performance, extrinsic CSR attributions have a significant negative effect on creative performance. We (...) also found that psychological safety mediates the positive relationship between intrinsic CSR and creative performance and the negative relationship between extrinsic CSR and creative performance. Directions for future research and implications for practice are discussed. (shrink)

This study contributes to the growing literature on individual-level outcomes of corporate social responsibility. Employing a sample of 339 subordinate–supervisor dyads, we explored the differential impact of CSR attributions on employees’ creative performance in the telecom industry. We also introduced and tested the role of psychological safety as a mediator underlying this relationship. The results indicate that although intrinsic CSR attributions are not directly related to creative performance, extrinsic CSR attributions have a significant negative effect on creative performance. We also (...) found that psychological safety mediates the positive relationship between intrinsic CSR and creative performance and the negative relationship between extrinsic CSR and creative performance. Directions for future research and implications for practice are discussed. (shrink)