RT Article
T1 How corporate social (ir)responsibility influences employees' private prosocial behavior: an experimental study
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 194
IS 1
SP 103
OP 118
A1 Koch, Irmela 1984-
A1 Biemann, Torsten
A2 Biemann, Torsten
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1905204760
AB The micro-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature has broadly demonstrated the effects of CSR on employees’ behavior but has mostly been limited to employees’ behavior within the work domain. This business-centered focus overlooks the potential of organizations to change employees’ private social and environmental behavior and thus to address grand societal challenges. Based on the social psychology literature on moral consistency and moral balancing, we conduct three experiments to investigate whether employees’ private prosocial behavior is consistent with their organization’s corporate social (ir)responsibility or whether employees aim to balance their private prosocial behavior, e.g., by compensating for their organization’s CSR activities with a reduced willingness to contribute outside the work domain. Our results provide support for a consistency effect such that employers’ environmental CSR activities increase employees’ donations and willingness to volunteer outside work. Environmental corporate social irresponsibility activities, on the contrary, reduce employees’ private donations and willingness to volunteer. We further find that the positive effects of environmental CSR are partly explained by the strengthening of employees’ environmental self-identity. Our findings highlight that organizational activities have consequences for employees’ moral behavior outside the work domain and thus have important implications for research and practice.
K1 Corporate social irresponsibility
K1 Corporate Social Responsibility
K1 Employees
K1 Environmental self-identity
K1 Medical Ethics
K1 Moral consistency
K1 Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
DO 10.1007/s10551-023-05608-5