Opening the black box between CSR and employees' attitudes : three empirical essays on the mechanisms driving employees' responses to CSR

For more than thirty-five years corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been a subject of great interest among management scholars and is today increasingly viewed by managers as a critical aspect of organizations’ strategy and daily operations. In the academic debate, the business case for CSR has enjoyed particular attention at the macro-level through the analysis of a direct link between corporate social and financial performance. Although recent meta-analytic reviews reported that CSR performance has a weak but positive influence on firms’ financial performance, the literature still needs to clarify why CSR initiatives can impact this performance. Therefore, a new priority in this field is no longer to investigate whether CSR works, but rather to investigate the underlying mechanisms explaining why, how and under which conditions CSR’s initiatives positively impact organizations’ performance. In this vein, scholars suggested that the business case for CSR may be better explained through intermediate performance variables pertaining to stakeholder attitudes towards a company. While most studies adopting this perspective have focused their attention on external stakeholders situated at the macro-level of analysis (e.g., organizational, institutional, (trans)national stakeholders), less attention has been paid to what happens inside the organization. This constitutes an important gap in knowledge, given that employees are critical contributors to organizational core functioning and thus performance. Moreover, employees, as members of the firm, are concerned about, contribute to, and react to organizations’ CSR initiatives, and as such, largely contribute to its social performance. To date the few studies taking employees as a unit of analysis have consistently showed that specific CSR initiatives, mainly directed at external stakeholders’ well-being, influence employees’ commitment in the workplace. However, our understanding of the underlying mechanisms through which CSR impacts employees’ commitment and other attitudes still remains embryonic. With this in mind, our three empirical essays contribute as a whole to moving beyond the prevailing macro focus on the CSR–performance link, by explaining some of the micro-level mechanisms through which CSR can impact employees’ attitudes and behaviours. If only doing good could be connected to doing well, then firms might be persuaded to invest in CSR and contribute more broadly to the well-being of society through social change.