The psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility: A person‐centric systematic review

Abstract

This article aims to consolidate the psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by taking stock and evaluating the recent surge of person-focused CSR research. With a systematic review, the authors identify, synthesize, and organize three streams of micro-CSR studies-focused on (i) individual drivers of CSR engagement, (ii) individual processes of CSR evaluations, and (iii) individual reactions to CSR initiatives-into a coherent behavioral framework. This review highlights significant gaps, methodological issues, and imbalances in the treatment of the three components in prior micro-CSR research. It uncovers the need to conceptualize how multiple drivers of CSR interact and how the plurality of mechanisms and boundary conditions that can explain individual reactions to CSR might be integrated theoretically. By organizing micro-CSR studies into a coherent framework, this review also reveals the lack of connections within and between substreams of micro-CSR research; to tackle them, this article proposes an agenda for further research, focused on six key challenges. concerns, the current review seeks to map, consolidate, and extend current knowledge about micro-CSR. We systematically review both conceptual and empirical micro-CSR studies, and we adopt a "person-centric" rather than "employee-centric" perspective, in which we consider persons other than employees, both within (e.g., executives and middle managers) and outside (e.g., job seekers and prospect employees) the organization. In this review, we identify three core components that provide foundations for prior studies of how CSR affects individuals: drivers (what drives CSR engagement?), evaluations (which cognitive and affective processes underlie people's evaluations of CSR initiatives?), and reactions (how, why, and when do individuals react to CSR initiatives?). We further unpack reactions to CSR by considering the mechanisms that underlie them (why), their boundary conditions (when), and their outcomes (how). In the Supporting Information, we provide an overview of prior studies and distinguish the groups of individuals-prospective employees (e.g., job seekers), employees (e.g., administrative staff), managers (e.g., middle managers), or executives (e.g., chief executive officers [CEOs] and chief financial officers)-considered in each study. 1 With this systematic review, not only do we extend prior micro-CSR research (Glavas, 2016;Rupp, Ganapathi, Aguilera, & Williams, 2006;Rupp & Mallory, 2015), but we also derive an agenda for ongoing micro-CSR research, focused on six key challenges: (i) exploring interactions among the drivers of CSR, (ii) pursuing construct clarification and valid measure development, (iii) bridging the various mechanisms of reactions to CSR, (iv) considering new and more relevant individual differences that operate as drivers of or boundary conditions on reactions to CSR, (v) expanding analyses of outcomes of reactions to CSR, and (vi) incorporating individual-level dynamics and learning processes.

How do things become strategic? ‘Strategifying’ corporate social responsibility

“…Although CSR has emerged as a prominent concept in business practice and in the strategy field (Porter and Kramer, 2011), its conceptualization at the individual of analysis has remained limited until a recent period (Aguinis and Glavas, 2012;Gond et al, 2017). In particular, relatively little is known about how individuals manage CSR within organizations, as prior research has focused on quantitative analyses of how employees perceive CSR and react to their perceptions of CSR (e.g., El-Akremi et al, forthcoming), and have neglected to analyze how and why CSR becomes meaningful for different individuals (Aguinis and Glavas, forthcoming).…”

When Do Theories Become Self-Fulfilling? Exploring the Boundary Conditions of Performativity

“…Our model also has implications for CSR research at the micro-level (Gond, El Akremi, Swaen, & Babu, 2017;Risi & Wickert, 2017). In an experiment whose subjects were business and economics students, Hafenbrädl and Waeger (2016) found that studying business and economics-rather than other disciplines-increases the belief in a positive CSP-CFP link, and that 80 percent of their subjects believed in that link.…”

When Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Meets Organizational Psychology: New Frontiers in Micro-CSR Research, and Fulfilling a Quid Pro Quo through Multilevel Insights

“…But this knowledge gap is now being filled by what can be appropriately described as an explosion of micro-CSR research conducted at the individual-level of analysis focusing on how and why job seekers, employees, and other individuals perceive and react to CSR (Glavas, 2016a). This explosion of scholarly activity is reflected in the recent publication of several reviews of micro-CSR research on employee recruitment, and reactions to CSR among incumbent employees (Peloza and Shang, 2011; Aguinis and Glavas, 2012; Jones and Willness, 2013; Willness and Jones, 2013; Rupp and Mallory, 2015; Glavas, 2016b; Gond et al, 2017; Jones and Rupp, in press). The micro-CSR literature also appears to be undergoing rapid maturation, as evidenced by advances in measurement (El Akremi et al, 2015), and the development of overarching theories about how and why individuals react to CSR practices, including theory about employee motives (Rupp et al, 2006; Bauman and Skitka, 2012; Glavas, 2016b; Jones and Rupp, in press), the underlying mechanisms through which job seekers are attracted by CSR (Jones et al, 2014), and a needs-based model of CSR motives that applies to micro-, meso-, and macro-level stakeholders (Aguilera et al, 2007).…”