The authors review the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature based on 588 journal articles and 102 books and book chapters. They offer a multilevel and multidisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes and integrates the literature at the institutional, organizational, and individual levels of analysis. The framework includes reactive and proactive predictors of CSR actions and policies and the outcomes of such actions and policies, which they classify as primarily affecting internal (i.e., internal outcomes) or external (i.e., external outcomes) stakeholders. The framework includes variables that explain underlying mechanisms (i.e., relationship-and value-based mediator variables) of CSR-outcomes relationships and contingency effects (i.e., people-, place-, price-, and profile-based moderator variables) that explain conditions under which the relationship between CSR and its outcomes change. The authors' review reveals important knowledge gaps related to the adoption of different theoretical orientations by researchers studying CSR at different levels of analysis, the need to understand underlying mechanisms linking CSR with outcomes, the need for research at micro levels of analysis (i.e., individuals and teams), and the need for methodological approaches that will help address these substantive knowledge gaps. Accordingly, they offer a detailed research agenda for the future, based on a multilevel perspective that aims to integrate diverse theoretical frameworks as well as develop an understanding of underlying mechanisms and microfoundations of CSR (i.e., foundations based on individual action and interactions). The authors also provide specific suggestions regarding research design, measurement, and data-analytic approaches that will be instrumental in carrying out their proposed research agenda.

ABSTRACT:We explore the impact on employee attitudes of their perceptions of how others outside the organization are treated (i.e., corporate social responsibility) above and beyond the impact of how employees are directly treated by the organization. Results of a study of 827 employees in eighteen organizations show that employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are positively related to (a) organizational commitment with the relationship being partially mediated by work meaningfulness and perceived organizational support (POS) and (b) job satisfaction with work meaningfulness partially mediating the relationship but not POS. Moreover, in order to address limited micro-level research in CSR, we develop a measure of employee perceptions of CSR through four pilot studies. Employing a bifactor model, we find that social responsibility has an additional effect on employee attitudes beyond environmental responsibility, which we posit is due to the relational component of social responsibility (e.g., relationships with community).

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) focuses on many types of stakeholders and outcomes, including stakeholders outside of the organization and outcomes that go beyond financial results. Thus, CSR expands the notion of work to go beyond a task, job, intraindividual, intraorganizational, and profit perspective and provides an ideal conduit for individuals to seek and find meaningfulness through work. We adopt a person-centric conceptualization of CSR by focusing on sensemaking as an underlying and unifying mechanism through which individuals are proactive and intentional agents who search for and find meaningfulness through work. Our conceptualization allows us to understand variability in CSR effects due to variability in employee sensemaking and the meaningfulness employees experience from CSR; highlight synergies across disconnected theories and streams of research originating in different disciplines and at the intraindividual, intraorganizational, and extraorganizational levels of analysis; and propose new research directions for the future in the form of propositions and research questions. By using sensemaking as a unifying underlying process, the proposed conceptualization explains how individuals find meaningfulness through work and, consequently, when and why employees experience CSR in a particular manner—resulting in more or less positive outcomes for themselves, their organizations, and external stakeholders. Our proposed model could also be used in other individual-level research domains that would benefit from (a) placing people and their search for meaningfulness center stage and (b) focusing on the role that same-level and cross-level interactions among intraindividual, intraorganizational, and extraorganizational sensemaking factors play in the process.

The author reviews the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature that includes the individual level of analysis (referred to as micro CSR in the article) based on 166 articles, book chapters, and books. A framework is provided that integrates organizational psychology and CSR, with the purpose of highlighting synergies in order to advance scholarship and practice in both fields. The review is structured so that first, a brief overview is provided. Second, the literatures on organizational psychology and CSR are integrated. Third, gaps are outlined illuminating opportunities for future research. Finally, a research agenda is put forward that goes beyond addressing gaps and focuses on how organizational psychology and CSR can be partners in helping move both fields forward—specifically, through a humanistic research agenda rooted in positive psychology.

We propose a new conceptualization to make sense of the vast and diverse body of work regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR): (a) embedded CSR and (b) peripheral CSR. This distinction relies on psychological foundations originating primarily in industrial-organizational psychology and related fields (i.e., organizational behavior, human resource management) and allows for a better understanding of when and why CSR is likely to lead to positive outcomes for employees, organizations, and society. Embedded CSR involves an organization's core competencies and integrates CSR within a firm's strategy, routines, and operations, and therefore affects all employees. In contrast, peripheral CSR focuses on activities that are not integrated into an organization's strategy, routines, and operations (e.g., philanthropy, volunteering). We use our conceptualization to explain the success of CSR initiatives at GE, IBM, and Intel, and to reinterpret the scholarly CSR literature in the fields of marketing, corporate governance and legal studies, and economics. We also describe how our conceptualization can help bridge the much lamented micro-macro and science-practice gaps and helps guide future CSR research as well as organizational interventions.