Abstract:
Research on the microfoundations of, and the business case for, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has bifurcated.
Micro-CSR scholars study how work meaningfulness and ethics explain individual responses to CSR initiatives but rarely consider how such responses relate to organizational outcomes; strategy scholars theorize organizational-level mechanisms but overlook the role of individuals in this process.
This paper bridges both perspectives by conceptualizing a multilevel “meaningfulness-identification” underlying mechanism by which CSR influences financial performance and by investigating the role of ethical climate as a boundary condition of this mechanism.
Drawing upon the psychological needs perspective, we posit that the (unit-level) influence of CSR on financial performance is sequentially mediated by (individual-level) perceptions of work meaningfulness and organizational identification.
This mechanism is predicted to vary in strength due to the moral consistency of CSR with the ethical climate. Data were collected from 2,005 employees nested in 244 South Korean banks’ branches with a six-wave survey and archival data.
The results of multilevel structural equation modeling support our theorization of a multilevel moderated mediation mechanism. We found the effects of the indirect mechanism to be stronger when the ethical climate is perceived as high, supporting our consistency argument.
Implications for research on meaningfulness in relation to identification, ethics and the microfoundations of CSR are finally discussed.