Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a for-profit organization’s business activities is fraught with tensions. This paper reports a case study of a construction company, exploring ...how different tensions emerged to challenge company-level aspirations for strategic CSR integration. The study identifies three types of persistent CSR tensions and four management practices, discussing how the management practices led the organization to navigate CSR tensions in both active and defensive ways. Furthermore, the study explicates why the case company succeeded in integrating CSR into formal business strategy and shared attitudes but struggled with CSR integration in the domain of day-to-day operations. The paper contributes to the CSR literature by developing a tension-centric perspective on CSR development. It highlights the necessity of tension navigation at both the organizational and the action levels, the key role of active (as opposed to defensive) navigation of CSR tensions, and the importance of alignment between organizational and action levels in navigating tensions for sustaining strategic focus on CSR over time.
Firms face mounting pressure to implement organization‐wide CSR initiatives in order to address social issues such as climate change, poverty alleviation, and inequality. Such efforts hinge on the ...engagement of employees throughout the organization. Yet, involving more employees in CSR, as well as the magnitude of organizational change required to address pressing social issues, are likely to trigger employee‐CSR (E‐CSR) tensions, i.e., tensions between employees' personal preferences for organizational CSR initiatives and their perceptions of the actual organizational CSR initiatives. While prior research on micro‐CSR has identified a range of employee engagement with CSR, it does not explain employees' CSR (dis)engagement when they experience E‐CSR tensions. We draw on the literature on individuals' responses to paradoxical tensions to unpack how and why employees who experience E‐CSR tensions (dis)engage differently with CSR initiatives. We develop a conceptual framework around the interplay of three drivers (type of tension, cognition, and organizational situatedness) to explain the employee response to E‐CSR tensions in terms of different types of (dis)engagement with CSR initiatives. We contribute to the micro‐CSR literature by explaining how and why employees (dis)engage differently with CSR initiatives with which they disagree, and to the microfoundations of paradox by challenging the dominant association between both/and thinking and generative outcomes vs either/or thinking and detrimental outcomes.
Abstract There has been a lot of discussion on the shift from voluntary to mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its impacts in different countries across the globe. India is unique in ...this context as the reporting and expenditure of a certain amount under CSR has been mandated for companies. This article analyzes the changes and responses of Indian businesses post‐2014, when new CSR rules were enacted. The key objectives of this study are to assess the level of awareness and compliance, thematic and geographical focus areas for CSR projects, and drivers and barriers to the adoption of mandatory CSR. We performed a secondary analysis of the data from 60 companies, followed by extensive primary research through in‐person interviews and offline questionnaire responses with 100 key CSR professionals from different companies in India. A key finding from the study is that the awareness of CSR policy and the pool of CSR funds has increased. The policy mandates have been a good driver in improving transparency and reporting quality. However, there is a predominant focus on four thematic areas of education, healthcare, hunger, and poverty alleviation despite the government's efforts to expand in other areas. The geographical spread of expenditure is limited to a few key industrial states in India, limiting CSR's contribution towards national development. The study adds to the CSR literature associated with institutional and stakeholder theories by looking at the response of legally bound organizations toward society and the environment. Finally, the study provides valuable information for governments and regulatory authorities considering the mandatory implementation of CSR expenditure across the globe.
This study proposes that consumers' attribution styles influence how they respond to corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages. The current study employs a cross-cultural experiment to examine ...the interplay of consumer attribution styles and message types on the outcome of CSR communication, and reveals a significant interaction between attribution style and CSR message. Individuals with a dispositional attribution style responded more favorably to evidence-based CSR messages than to belief-based messages, while those with a situational attribution style responded more favorably to belief-based messages than to evidence-based messages. This study extends cross-cultural research into the area of CSR communication and offers practical guidelines for international marketers and corporations on how to communicate their CSR involvement to global consumers.
This study examines how the CSR committee and CSR-linked executive compensation jointly affect CSR performance as governance mechanisms. Prior studies provided mixed results on the CSR committee’s ...effect on CSR performance. We posit that a CSR committee has both a direct and an indirect positive effect on CSR performance, with CSR-linked compensation playing the role of mediator in the relationship. We base our analysis on a sample of 164 Canadian firms covering the period 2012–2018, for a total of 952 firm-year observations. We propose a regression-based approach for our mediation research design. Our findings reveal that CSR-linked compensation mediates the CSR committee’s positive effect on performance, but the type of mediation depends on whether the performance is social or environmental. We provide evidence of both direct and indirect effects on environmental performance but only a positive indirect effect on social performance. These results suggest that demands from the firm’s internal and external stakeholders are treated differently, with the former receiving priority.
We analyse the relationship between the complexity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and actual CSR performance, and postulate a positive association between actual CSR performance ...and readability and the size of CSR disclosure documents. Using several readability and disclosure size measures from computational linguistics, we test our hypotheses using a cross-sectional sample of stand-alone CSR reports issued by large U.S. companies. We find that increased CSR disclosure and more readable CSR reports are associated with better CSR performance. Our findings suggest that extending CSR disclosure increases transparency regarding firms’ social and environmental performance, while using less-readable language in CSR reports increases obfuscation. This study contributes to the disclosure literature by documenting that the complexity indices that have been used as measures of obfuscation in prior finance and accounting research can help shareholders, financial analysts, and investors determine the credibility of CSR disclosure.
•Internationalization positively affects CSR reporting as such practices improve legitimacy of emerging market firms abroad.•Internationalization affects different types of CSR activities in ...different ways.•State-ownership moderates the relationships between internationalization and CSR reporting.•The effect of state-ownership on internationalization-CSR reporting relations is stronger for non-CIS locations.
This paper explores the relationship between internationalization and corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in Russian firms. Our baseline argument is that internationalization positively affects CSR reporting, as it is expected to enhance the legitimacy of Russian firms abroad. We examine the role of state ownership, and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) vs. non-CIS location, as two boundary conditions on the relationship between internationalization and CSR reporting. We test our hypotheses on panel data of 223 large Russian firms for the period 2012–2017, collected from company annual reports, databases, and official company websites. Our data include financial and non-financial indicators, and firm-level organizational characteristics. The results reveal the context specificity of CSR reporting. We find that state ownership moderates the relationship between internationalization and CSR reporting in CIS and non-CIS markets differently, and the positive effect is stronger for non-CIS locations. Our study goes beyond the traditional approach, treating CSR reporting as a unidimensional construct. We show that the effect of internationalization, both direct and moderated, differs for the different types of CSR activity.
Hospitality studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) have largely examined its role in stimulating positive behaviors but overlooked its role in preventing negative behaviors among employees. ...Drawing from social identity theory, the present study addresses this gap by investigating four CSR dimensions' impact on employee opportunistic behavior. The joint use of covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) supported examining the research model. Using two-wave data from 281 U.S. hospitality employees, SEM findings reveal that legal and philanthropic dimensions of CSR serve as a valuable shield against opportunistic behavior. Moreover, organizational identification (OI) fully mediates the effects of economic, legal, and ethical CSR on opportunistic behavior, whereas philanthropic CSR exerts no effect through OI. This study advances CSR studies by examining the CSR-opportunistic behavior nexus using combined symmetric and asymmetric approaches. FsQCA findings make a methodological contribution to the net effects of CSR, by determining two configurations that explain opportunistic behavior.
Although previous hospitality studies investigated the impact of CSR directed at various stakeholders, these studies have largely overlooked the impact of perceived inconsistent CSR (ICSR) strategies ...on unexpected employee outcomes. To fill the gap, this study investigates how perceived ICSR strategies affect employee deviant behavior through perceived corporate hypocrisy and symbolic CSR attributions (SCSRAs). Survey data were collected 472 employees working in four- and five-star hotels in Antalya, Turkiye and analyzed using PLS-SEM. The findings indicate that perceived ICSR strategies has a positive impact on perceived corporate hypocrisy and SCSRAs. Corporate hypocrisy and SCSRAs play a serial mediating role between perceived ICSR strategies and employee deviant behavior. This research enriches our understanding of the challenges faced by hospitality organizations in coping with CSR issues effectively.
•The study focuses on employees' negative reactions to CSR in the current micro-level research agenda•The study investigates the impact of the employee perceived inconsistent CSR (ICSR) strategies on employee deviant behavior•ICSR has a positive impact on both perceived corporate hypocrisy and symbolic CSR attributions (SCSRAs)•Corporate hypocrisy and SCSRAs play a serial mediating role between ICSR strategies and deviant behavior.
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