Frontline Employees as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Ambassadors: A Quasi-Field Experiment

Laura Marie Edinger-Schons (), Lars Lengler-Graiff (), Sabrina Scheidler () and Jan Wieseke ()
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Laura Marie Edinger-Schons: Mannheim University
Lars Lengler-Graiff: Ruhr University of Bochum
Sabrina Scheidler: Ruhr University of Bochum
Jan Wieseke: Ruhr University of Bochum

Journal of Business Ethics, 2019, vol. 157, issue 2, No 5, 359-373

Abstract: Abstract As past research has identified frontline employees as the primary communicators of a company’s CSR, this paper reports on a large-scale quasi-field experiment aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the levers of successful in-store, point-of-sale, CSR communication. In cooperation with a large international retailer, the authors analyzed the effects of varying in-store CSR communication strategies in 48 unique stores, combining data from a customer survey (N = 38,999), company records of customers’ real visits and purchases, and interviews with store managers. Taking into account the nested structure of the data, the authors reveal that CSR-related training of frontline employees bestows its favorable effect on customers and customer behavior only if it is accompanied by the store managers’ personal support for CSR.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility (CSR); CSR communication; In-store communication; Point-of-sale communication; Boundary-spanning agents; Frontline employees; CSR ambassadors; CSR-related training of employees; Managers’ personal support (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3790-9

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