Understanding employees' responses to corporate social responsibility: mediating roles of overall justice and organisational identification

Abstract

Prior research has suggested that corporate social responsibility (CSR) contributes to organisations' competitive advantage by influencing stakeholders' attitudes. While existing research indicates that CSR relates to some employee outcomes, the mechanisms that drive employees' responses to CSR initiatives remain largely unexplored. This study relies on social identity theory to propose and test a model with 181 hospital employees that attempts to explain why and how CSR can positively influences employees' attitudes. Specifically, this study examines the impact of two aspects of an organisation's socially responsible behaviours, i.e. employees' perceptions of CSR initiatives directed at internal and external stakeholders, on employees' job satisfaction. The findings indicate that perceived CSR relates positively to job satisfaction through its effects on overall justice perceptions and organisational identification. These results suggest that employees appear to use CSR initiatives to assess their organisation's character and identify with it. Accordingly, CSR initiatives have particular importance as a mean to support organisational efforts to create strong relationships with their employees and thereby improve their attitudes at work.

Keywords::

• corporate social responsibility
• employee–organisation relationship
• job satisfaction
• organisational identification
• overall justice

Notes

^1. Considering the few original items in Turker's scale for CSR to customers, we developed two additional items to increase potential scale reliability (Hellman, Fuqua and Worley 2006), which we derived from existing literature (e.g. Maignan et al. 1999): ‘[Name of the hospital] has implemented a procedure to respond to every patient complaint’ and ‘[Name of the hospital] listens to its patients and communicates with clarity and honesty with them’.