Two Faces of Corporate Social Responsibility: An Employee Perspective

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Social Responsibility

Abstract

This study theorizes the effects of a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative on changes in its employees’ behavioral and attitudinal workplace orientations. Building on an employee perspective, we postulate that employees’ perceptions of the authenticity of their firm’s CSR initiative mediate how their perception of the CSR’s legitimacy affects their orientations. We propose that employees rely on two legitimacy mechanisms, external and internal, to account for their firm’s CSR initiatives. External legitimacy occurs when employees perceive that their firm’s CSR motive is instrumental in dealing with the pressures of competition in its organizational field. Internal legitimacy occurs when employees perceive that their firm’s CSR activity expresses its moral mission and ideology. Our model indicates that internal legitimacy promotes perceptions of authenticity, while external legitimacy reduces them. We also extrapolate the model into a general model of authentic management that explicates general cases of managerial practices and innovation.

Authors

• Jeongkoo Yoon, EWHA Woman's University

• Soojung Lee, Ewha School of Business