When Corporate Social Responsibility Backfires: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

John List and Fatemeh Momeni ()
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Fatemeh Momeni: Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637

Management Science, 2021, vol. 67, issue 1, 8-21

Abstract: This paper uses a natural field experiment to connect corporate social responsibility (CSR) to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 1,500 workers, we find that our use of CSR increases employee misbehavior—24% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duties when we introduce CSR. Observed data patterns across the treatments are consonant with a model of “moral licensing,” whereby the “doing good” nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that is harmful to the firm.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility; natural field experiment; employee; misbehavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:67:y:2021:i:1:p:8-21

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