Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gained increasing attention and popularity since the last decade. There are many CSR debates arise since then. These debates were shaped by trends and fundamental changes of the political, social, and economic spheres of life. Tracing back, the precursor to CSR was topic of charitable giving, which had been in existence since 1980s. Todate, CSR has evolved to a business concept that had been accepted widely. Business corporations are focusing on CSR due to tremendous pressures from the society. Presently, CSR approach has emerged from focusing on the shareholders to stakeholders due to the acknowledgement of the crucial roles of stakeholders in every organisation. Stakeholder management and CSR is a relational affair. Stakeholder theory involves list of critical stakeholders namely employees, 260 NGOs, that could be source of new competitive advantage. This present a research agenda to look into internal CSR practices as to how it manifest among the crucial stakeholders of every organisation, i.e. the employees, on their attitudes and behaviours. As Small Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are gaining its foothold in Malaysia, they also encountered many challenges, one of these is the issue of high employee turnover that lead to substantial costs to the organisations. The findings reveal that internal CSR practices enhanced employee's job satisfaction and also resulted in the reduction of employee's turnover intention. It was interesting to discover that internal CSR practices enhance employee's organisational commitment like job satisfaction, but it failed to reduce employee's turnover intention through enhanced organisation commitment as a result of internal CSR practices. The results also show that perceived ease of movement has an impact on employee's turnover intention.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of ethics and social responsibility on employees’ affective commitment in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach This is a quantitative research. The authors employ multistage sampling technique, non-probability and judgmental sampling method. Data were collected through questionnaire survey to measure the respondents’ perceptions of the ethics and social responsibility, as well as internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. The data obtained were analyzed through variance-based structural equation modeling (SEM), i.e., partial least square SEM. Findings The findings reveal that perceived role of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR) and internal CSR are positively related to employees’ affective commitment. Job satisfaction is found to be mediating the relationship between PRESOR and affective commitment. The result also showed that internal CSR practices mediate the relationship between PRESOR and affective commitment. Research limitations/implications There are few limitations in the present research. First, present research merely investigates the practices of ethics and social responsibility by SMEs and did not perform a comparison with larger organizations. Second, the use of non-probability sampling method is unable to generalize results for the entire population. Future research could address the shortcoming of present research in order to further contribute to the academic and business world. Practical implications The findings provide insights to entrepreneurs and SMEs on the manifestation of ethics and social responsibility in enhancing employees’ affective commitment. In turn, it reduces employees’ turnover intention and enhances SMEs sustainability to strive in the competitive environment. Social implications These findings highlight the positive chain effects of enterprises in discharging their moral obligation as well as their social responsibility. The enterprises are benefited from the good reputation which may act as a magnet to attract talent-employees and also sustaining their enterprises through employees’ retention. Originality/value This research paper contributes to current knowledge by painting a better picture on the importance of ethics and social responsibility and internal CSR from the employees’ perception. As to date, employees’ perception of ethics and social responsibility and internal CSR practices are still under-investigated. Moreover, past research often focuses the impact of ethics and social responsibility in the larger corporation but scant research is conducted in the smaller organization such as SMEs.