CER as a workforce strategy: investigating how and when corporate environmental responsibility promotes organizational attractiveness

Fan Wu and Bokai Lei

Nankai Business Review International, 2026, vol. 17, issue 1, 180-202

Abstract: PurposeCorporate environmental responsibility (CER) has become a global focus for businesses. While existing research has predominantly emphasized CER’s institutional and environmental outcomes, its psychological mechanisms in shaping employee perceptions remain underexplored. Drawing on the instrumental-symbolic framework of organizational attractiveness, this study aims to investigate how CER influences organizational attractiveness through two psychological pathways – specifically, fostering organizational pride (as a symbolic attribute) and improving perceived treatment (as an instrumental attribute) – and to examine the moderating role of corporate ability.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a multi-method design. It includes two studies: Study 1 is an experiment with 200 potential employees, and Study 2 is a multi-wave survey of 423 current employees.FindingsThe results indicate that CER positively influences organizational attractiveness. Organizational pride and perceived treatment serve as parallel mediators, jointly explaining the relationship between CER and organizational attractiveness. Additionally, corporate ability negatively moderates these relationships: CER exerts stronger effects in organizations with lower corporate ability.Originality/valueThis study centers on employees’ psychological responses to further understand how CER functions as a micro-level strategy to enhance organizational attractiveness. These findings not only expand the literature on corporate environmental management but also provide practical insights for integrating environmental initiatives into workforce strategies.

Keywords: Corporate environmental responsibility; Organizational attractiveness; Organizational pride Perceived treatment; Corporate ability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/nbri/article/17/1/180/1334 ... nvestigating-how-and (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/nbri/article-pdf/17/1/180/ ... i-08-2025-0103en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:nbripp:nbri-08-2025-0103

DOI: 10.1108/NBRI-08-2025-0103

Access Statistics for this article

Nankai Business Review International is currently edited by Dr Xuexiu Wang and Professor Li Wei'an

More articles in Nankai Business Review International from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().