Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Engagement: Making the Connection WHITEPAPER

This paper provides a multi-level theoretical model to understand why business organizations are increasingly engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and thereby exhibiting the potential to exert positive social change. Our model integrates theories of micro-level organizational justice, meso-level corporate governance, and macro-level varieties of capitalisms. Using a theoretical framework presented in the justice literature, we argue that organizations are pressured to engage in CSR by many different actors, each driven by instrumental, relational and moral motives. These actors are situated within four “levels” of analysis: individual, organizational, national and transnational. After discussing the motives affecting actors at each level and the mechanisms used at each level to exercise influence, as well as the interactions of motives within levels, we examine forces across levels to propose the complex web of factors, which both facilitate and impede social change by organizations. Ultimately, this proposed framework can be used to systematize our understanding of the complex social phenomenon of increasing CSR engagement, and to develop testable hypotheses. We conclude by highlighting some empirical questions for future research, and discussing a number of managerial implications. Conclusions: There exist many different ways to exert positive social change in society and many different agents who have the explicit power to trigger such change. This special topic forum of AMR points to corporations as important and necessary social change agents, and this paper has identified the many actors that place pressure on corporations to impart social change. We have discussed the specific motives driving CSR at four levels of analysis and draw from distinct research literatures to develop our model. We propose this model as a starting point for future empirical research in an effort to systematize the analysis of CSR, such that its potential contribution to positive social change can be maximized. Key findings related to employee engagement: • Employees are among the multiple actors that push organizations to act in a socially responsible or irresponsible manner. • All actors and interest groups including employees have three main motives for pressuring firms to engage in CSR: • instrumental (self-interest driven), • relational (concerned with relationships among group members), and • moral (concerned with ethical standards and moral principles). • Employees’ perceptions of the firm’s external CSR are a special aspect of their more general justice perceptions, and these CSR perceptions shape the employees’ subsequent attitudes and behaviours towards their firm. In other words, employees’ CSR perceptions matter in that they predict outcomes such as performance, turnover and well-being. • Employees make three distinct judgments about their employing organization’s CSR efforts. That is, employees judge the social concern imbedded in an organization’s actions (procedural CSR), the outcomes that result from such actions (distributive CSR), and how individuals, both within and outside the organization, are treated interpersonally as these actions are carried out (interactional CSR). These judgments then lead to a number of employee actions (mechanisms) that may place pressure on organizations to implement CSR initiatives, including organizational attraction, commitment, and retention; job satisfaction and performance; citizenship behaviours; and employee participation and leadership in CSR initiatives. In other words, employees push for CSR directly by actively advocating for, leading, and participating in CSR initiatives as well as indirectly by reciprocating socially responsible actions through heightened performance and firm loyalty/commitment. Title Putting the S Back In Corporate Social Responsibility: A MultiLevel Theory of Social Change in Organizations Author(s) Ruth V. Aguilera, Deborah E. Rupp, Cynthia A. Williams and Jyoti Ganapathi Institution University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, U.S. Publication date September 2004