How Can an Image of Sustainability Be Trusted? The Inner World of Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widespread in the commercial world, but companies often face suspicion regarding the latent motivation behind their CSR activities. How can firms make outside observers perceive their CSR as authentic and gain trust? Instead of focusing on CSR content and activities, we look into an organization’s intrinsic sensemaking process of CSR. Identity orientation, legitimacy, and posture are identified as three important attributes that reflect firms’ mental frame regarding CSR. We demonstrate type-by-type links among these sensemaking attributes and build configurations of CSR profiles to explore how these attributes work in combination to help firms gain trust from outside observers. Two scenario experiments are employed to test our hypotheses. The results indicate that observers’ trust is high when these three attributes are perceived as consistently and coherently underlying firms’ CSR activities. Specifically, when individual identity orientation is configured with pragmatic legitimacy and a defensive posture or when relational identity orientation is configured with moral legitimacy and a tentative posture, observers’ trust can be enhanced.