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Identity, Importance, and Their Roles in How Corporate Social Responsibility Affects Workplace Attitudes and Behavior

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Abstract

This paper contributes to growing research exploring employee attitudinal and behavioral reactions to organizational corporate social responsibility initiatives focused on environmental and social responsibility and sustainability. Drawing on social identity theory, we develop and test a moderated-mediation model where employees’ organizational identification mediates the relationship between their perceptions of organizational CSR initiatives and their work engagement and organizational citizenship behaviors, but this relationship is positive only when employees value the role of organizations in supporting environmental and social causes. In a survey of 250 employees from a variety of German organizations, across a range of industry sectors, our hypotheses were fully supported. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Goethe University, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6, 60323, Frankfurt, Germany

    Rolf van Dick & Sandra Karpf

  2. Department of Work and Organisational Psychology, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK

    Jonathan R. Crawshaw

  3. China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai, China

    Sebastian C. Schuh

  4. Antai College of Economics and Management of Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Xin-an Zhang

Authors
  1. Rolf van Dick
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  2. Jonathan R. Crawshaw
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  3. Sandra Karpf
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  4. Sebastian C. Schuh
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  5. Xin-an Zhang
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Correspondence to Rolf van Dick.

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van Dick, R., Crawshaw, J.R., Karpf, S. et al. Identity, Importance, and Their Roles in How Corporate Social Responsibility Affects Workplace Attitudes and Behavior. J Bus Psychol 35, 159–169 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-019-09619-w

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