Abstract
Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has tended to focus on external stakeholders and outcomes, revealing little about internal effects that might also help explain CSR-firm performance linkages and the impact that corporate marketing strategies can have on internal stakeholders such as employees. The two studies (N = 1,116 and N = 2,422) presented in this article draw on theory from both corporate marketing and organizational behavior (OB) disciplines to test the general proposition that employee trust partially mediates the relationship between CSR and employee attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Both studies provide evidence in support of these general relationships. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the context of CSR and corporate marketing research.
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Notes
To further examine model fit we followed the logic of Bollen (1989); all of our SEM analyses were re-run on random sub-samples (N = 500 and N = 200) taken from both studies’ datasets. We observed CMIN/df’s below 5 for all re-analyses, along with good fit for all other fit indices for all models tested in both studies, suggesting that high original CMIN values were indeed artifacts of large sample sizes and not indications of poor model fit.
“Bootstrap analyses” (Efron and Tibshirani 1993) in this context constituted direct measures of the indirect effect of corporate social responsibility on turnover and citizenship behaviors through the mediator (trust), after controlling for education and tenure. Unlike the Sobel test, this method, requiring an SPSS macro, does not assume mathematical distributions and is now considered to be a legitimate follow-up for, if not a replacement of, the Sobel test (Sobel 1982) because of its increased power and ease of use (see MacKinnon et al. 2002; Preacher and Hayes 2008). As part of the boostrapping process, 5,000 resamples from the original datasets set were used to re-estimate the partially mediated model. We observed results that confirmed partial mediation and supported outcomes of Sobel tests and chi-square difference tests.
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Hansen, S.D., Dunford, B.B., Boss, A.D. et al. Corporate Social Responsibility and the Benefits of Employee Trust: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective. J Bus Ethics 102, 29–45 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0903-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0903-0