Academy of Management 2014 Meeting attendants, seminar participants at INSEAD, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. Last but not least, we are very grateful to the managers and employees of the research site for their cooperation and insights. Any errors remain our own.

Addressing societal issues increasingly requires multistakeholder collaboration. Yet, cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are often difficult to form and maintain because of coordination problems and conflicting interests of the organizations involved. To better understand how organizations overcome these challenges, we take a micro-foundational approach. First, we conducted an in-depth case study of a consulting firm to examine the emergence of a platform for CSPs. Second, using survey data from 665 employees, we identified critical elements that contributed to the stability of the platform. Our findings reveal how a for-profit organization can play a key role in coordinating other organizations to achieve social impact. We found that the emergence and stability of the platform were based on a novel operating model that aligned senior leaders' interests in improving employee retention, employees' desire for meaning in their work, and employees' willingness to make short-term financial sacrifices to participate. Our study suggests that for-profit firms can play a central role in social impact collaborations but that doing so requires alignment of internal interests through intrapreneurship. It also underlines the potential value of using a micro-foundation approach in future research into CSPs.We thank Bocconi University and INSEAD for funding this research. We thank Filipe Santos and Arzi Adbi for their feedback on an earlier draft of the article. We acknowledge the generosity of the management and employees of our research site for the time invested in the interviews and for implementing the employee survey. Any errors remain our own.

Research Summary: Companies often justify their corporate social initiatives by citing talent management benefits. We examine the extent of, and the reasons for, employee interest in such an initiative in a global management consulting firm. We find a large fraction of employees to be interested in participation in the initiative even when participation requires a personal sacrifice in the form of a salary cut. However, this interest is driven not just by prosocial motivation: Expectations regarding private benefits, such as improved career prospects from new skills acquired, also play a role. Considerations of social impact and private benefits are equally salient when no salary cut is required, but private considerations become more prominent when participating employees are asked to accept a salary cut. Managerial Summary: Many companies are moving from stand‐alone corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects to social initiatives integrated into strategy. Providing employees with the opportunity to participate in such initiatives is said to help attract, motivate and retain talent. In this study, carried out in collaboration with a management consulting firm, we examine how much and why employees value participation in a corporate social initiative. Based on interviews and survey data, we find that employees are not only interested in, but often even willing to accept, a temporary salary cut for the opportunity. However, altruistic motivation is not the only driver of this interest: Employees also expect and value the possibility that the experience would lead to private benefits, such as developing skills likely to enhance their career prospects.

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Firms increasingly offer employees the opportunity to participate in firm-sponsored social impact initiatives expected to benefit the firm and employees. We argue that participation in such initiatives hinders employees’ advancement in their firms by reducing others’ perceptions of their fit and commitment. Because social impact work is more congruent with female than male gender role stereotypes, promotion rates will be lower for participating men, and male evaluators will be less likely than female evaluators to recommend promotion for male participants. Using panel data on 1,379 employees of a consulting firm, we find significantly lower promotion rates for male participants relative to female participants, female non-participants, and male non-participants. A vignette experiment involving 893 managers shows that lower promotion rates are due to lower perceptions of fit, but not commitment, and greater bias against male participants by male evaluators. Taken together, the results of the two studies suggest that the negative effect of participation on promotion is conditional upon participant and evaluator gender, underscoring the role of gender in evaluation of social impact work. In settings in which decision makers are predominately male, gender beliefs may limit male employees’ latitude to contribute to the firm’s social impact agenda.