Hypocritical organizations: Implications for employee social responsibility

Nishat Babu, Kenneth De Roeck and Nicolas Raineri

Journal of Business Research, 2020, vol. 114, issue C, 376-384

Abstract: The implications of corporate hypocrisy for corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the employee level of analysis remain largely unexplored. Drawing on attribution theory and the sensemaking perspective of CSR, we develop a model that highlights the negative effects of corporate hypocrisy on employees' voluntary contribution to their firm's social responsibility program (employee social responsibility, or ESR), as mediated by symbolic CSR attributions. Moreover, by incorporating the CSR sensitivity framework, we develop a more nuanced model that acknowledges the role of task significance in strengthening the aforementioned relationship. The results from our cross-lagged study first suggest that corporate hypocrisy negatively affects ESR through the intermediary role of symbolic CSR attributions. Second, the findings reveal that task significance moderates the relationship between corporate hypocrisy and ESR, such that both the direct and indirect effects are stronger for employees whose jobs are higher in task significance. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Keywords: Attribution theory; Corporate hypocrisy; Employee social responsibility; Sensemaking; Symbolic CSR; Task significance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296319304515
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jbrese:v:114:y:2020:i:c:p:376-384

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.07.034

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().