Getting Paid to Be Good: How and When Employees Respond to Corporate Social Responsibility?

Despite the increasing interest in corporate social responsibility’s impact on the employee behaviours at a micro level, only a handful of literature is available discussing the underlying processes and contingencies of how employees respond to corporate social activities. Based on self-enhancement theory and social-exchange theory, we provide a serial mediated moderation process model to analyze the effect of perceived corporate social responsibility on employees’ organizational citizenship behaviour and task performance through organizational pride and identification and contingency of desire to have a significant impact through work. We empirically validate the framework by carrying out four surveys to collect the multiple-response data of middle managers, their colleagues, and their managers. Study findings reveal that the link between employees perceived corporate social responsibility and their workplace behaviours is serially mediated by organizational pride and identification and moderated by employees’ desire to have a significant impact through work. This study contributes to the micro-CSR stream of clean production literature by providing a well-developed framework to understand how and when perceived corporate social responsibility influence employees’ workplace behaviour, having several theoretical and practical implications.