Catering to the Needs of an Aging Workforce: The Role of Employee Age in the Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Satisfaction

Abstract

Contemporary organizations often reciprocate to society for using resources and for affecting stakeholders by engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR). It has been shown that CSR has a positive impact on employee attitudes. However, not all employees may react equally strongly to CSR practices. Based on socio-emotional selectivity theory (Carstensen in Science 312:1913-1915, 2006, we contend that the effect of CSR on employee satisfaction will be more pronounced for older than for younger employees, because CSR practices address those emotional needs and goals that are prioritized when people's future time perspective decreases. In one multi-source field study (N = 143) and one experimental study (N = 500), we demonstrate that CSR indeed has a stronger positive effect on employee satisfaction for older relative to younger employees. Accordingly, engaging in CSR can be an attractive tool for organizations that aim to keep their aging workforce satisfied with their job.

What Dimension of CSR Matters to Organizational Resilience? Evidence from China

“…In terms of CSR's performance-enhancing mechanism, positive relationships with various stakeholders contribute to building a wide network of knowledge and resources that provides flexibility and efficiency for an organization's internal activities and supports its business plans for innovation and adaptation [4,47,48]. Specifically, a firm's CSR engagement can internally increase employee satisfaction and commitment that further promote employees' innovative behaviors [12][13][14][15]. Also, enterprises that strategically engage in CSR are likely to innovate their product and process to meet stakeholders' desires, which brings them distinguished competitive advantages for long-term performance growth [16,17].…”

“…In addition, the resilient organization relies on an emotional investment and commitment to its employees, such as caring, fair treatment, respect, trust, and empowerment [73]. This can contribute to increasing employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment [13], encourage employees to respond flexibly to environmental changes [1,15], and therefore generate competitive advantages and commercial interests [12]. In this respect, Kachaner, Stalk [63] find that rather than financial incentives, resilient family firms rely on a culture of commitment and goals to achieve trust, dedication, and efficient teams, which contributes to a high level of employee productivity during both good and bad times.…”

“…Third, consistent with the operationalization of organizational resilience as long-term growth and financial volatility, this paper discusses both CSR's performance-enhancing and performance-insuring mechanisms. The extant literature has mostly focused on CSR's performance-enhancing mechanism, discussing whether CSR has a positive impact on corporate performance or not [13][14][15]. Recently, several scholars have come up with that CSR can also provide insurance -like protections to a firm's financial performance, that is, CSR can protect a firm's financial performance from being extensively fluctuated during negative or adverse events [23].…”

“…Accordingly, consistent with the mainstream view [6-10], we operationalize organizational resilience as the ability to achieve both high-level performance growth and low-level financial volatility over a long term.Then, we analyze the impact of CSR on firms' long-term growth and financial volatility respectively through the theoretical lens of CSR's performance-enhancing and performance-insuring mechanisms. The performance-enhancing view holds that CSR can promote performance growth by improving employee satisfaction and retention [11][12][13], social image [14], innovation performance [15][16][17], customer satisfaction [18,19], brand equity [20], investment efficiency [21]. The performance-insuring view on the other hand, claims that CSR can provide buffers and supports to absorb shocks, undertake appropriate responses when a company suffers from crises and adverse events, thus mitigating negative impacts and financial volatility [22,23].…”

Institutional transitions and the role of financial performance in CSR reporting

“…Second, firms in developing/less-developed regions with immature market mechanisms seek political connections to gain strategic advantages such as lower financial costs (Wisse, van Eijbergen, Rietzschel, & Scheibe, 2018). With fewer pressures from other stakeholders outside of the government, these firms can publish a CSR report according to their own needs rather than under external pressures.…”