Antecedents And Consequences Of Employee Engagement In CSR Programs

As companies play an increasingly critical role in our society,people’ expectations toward companies are not only manufacturing commodities and creating profit,but also taking social responsibility and contributing to societal well-being.In the wake of corporate social responsibility(CSR),companies have proactively attempted diverse patterns,ranging from philanthropy to corporate volunteering and social entrepreneurship.Meanwhile,business have expected their employees to engage in corporate social responsibility,as a way to serve both corporate and societal well-being.However,engagement in CSR is based upon employees’will and call for extra time and efforts,employees who engage in CSR have to take more workload and cost more effort.Based upon this logic,some negative influence of employee engagement in CSR can occur.Thus,motivating and managing employees’engagement in the corporate social responsibility actions will be critical for the companies.However,previous literature failed to systamtically address the above research question.Drawing upon the theory of planned behavior,social information processing theory,and job meaningfulness theory,we proposed the theoretical model on antecedents and consequences of employee engagement in corporate social responsibility,the model that response to two key theoretical questions:what kind of employees would like to engage in CSR;what kind of influence will employee’s engagement in CSR bring to their task performance and OCB(OCB).A pilot study was taken as a first step to test the scale of employee engagement in CSR.Then,we collected two independent and time-lagged samples to examine the antecedent variables and consequence variables respectively.With the help of factor analysis,random coefficient modeling,multilevel structural equation modeling,and Monte Carlo simulation,we tested the hypotheses and reached three key conclusions:Study 1:We collected 152 employee samples from two high-tech manufacturing companies as a pilot study to validate the scale of employee engagement in CSR.Exploratory factor analysis with one factor explained 60.10 percent of the total variance among items.All the eight items were significantly loaded on the latent factor.Study 2:We introduced prosocial motivation and CSR significance to explain employee engagement in CSR.Building upon social information processing theory,we integrated team ethical climate in the model and tested its cross-level moderating effect.We collected two waves of survey data,one month apart from each other,from three high-tech manufacturing companies and received 456 employees sample from 84 teams.We found that both prosocial motivation and CSR significance were positively related to employee engagement in CSR.We then found that the interaction between prosocial motivation and CSR significance was positively related to employee engagement in CSR.We also found that the team ethical climate strengthened the positive relationship between prosocial motivation and employee engagement in CSR but failed to strengthen the positive relationship between CSR significance and employee engagement in CSR.The result of three-way interaction indicated that the highest level of employee engagement occurred when prosocial motivation,CSR significance,and team ethical climate were high.Study 3:we proposed that employee engagement in CSR simultaneously engendered a positive indirect path to employee job performance(i.e.,task performance,OCB)via role meaningfulness,and a negative indirect path to employee job performance(i.e.,task performance,OCB)via role overload.We then proposed that prosocial impact played an important moderating role in this model.We collected two waves of survey data,one month apart from each other,from a pharmacy chain company and received survey data from 236 employees and 49 direct supervisors.We found that employee engagement in CSR was positively related to role meaningfulness and role overload,that role meaningfulness mediated the positive indirect relationship between employee engagement and job performance(i.e.,task performance,OCB),and that role overload mediated the negative indirect relationship between employee engagement in CSR and task performance.Furthermore,we also found that perceived prosocial impact strengthened the positive relationship between employee engagement in CSR and role meaningfulness,but weakened the positive relationship between employee engagement in CSR and role overload.Finally,results of a serial of moderated mediation tests indicated that the negative indirect path from employee engagement in CSR to task performance and OCB via role overload was weaker among employee with high level of perceived prosocial impact and that the positive indirect path from employee engagement in CSR to OCB via role meaningfulness was more pronounced among employee with high level of perceived prosocial impact.Based upon the above research,this paper made four contributions to the literature:First,we took engagement perspective rather than traditional perception perspective as a way to contribute to the micro-foundation of CSR research.As perception perspective not only neglected the role that employees played in CSR programs but also was contaminated by employee-organization relationship.Building upon engagement perspective,we thus proposed and validated the scale of employee engagement in CSR,and then examined the theoretical model on antecedents and consequences of employee engagement in CSR so as to explain the motivation of and condition under which employee engagement in CSR and clarify the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between employee engagement in CSR and job performance.Second,we proposed and clarify the effect of CSR significance on employee engagement in CSR.As business taken mixed attitudes towards CSR activity,ranging from maximizing profit to solving social issues.Without a clear attitude towards CSR significance,employee will unlikely to engage in CSR.Furthermore,we suggested that CSR significanc is a key boundary condition of the relationship between prosocial motivation and employee engagement in CSR.As prosocial motivation leads to multiple behavioral outcome,CSR significance will facilitate the formation of the linkage between prosocial motivation and engagement in CSR.Third,we presented the double-edged effects of employee engagement in CSR on job performance.Building upon engagement perspective,employee engagement in CSR on one hand can enrich the job scope and role meaningfulness,on the other hand can exhaust employees’ extra time and energy.Thus,we proposed two opposing mechanisms to explain the relationship between employee engagement in CSR and job performance.Fourth,we included perceived prosocial impact as a key moderating variable into the consequence variables research.We found that prosocial impact strengthened the relationship between engagement in CSR and role meaningfulness and weakened the relationship between engagement in CSR and role overload.Taken together,our research enriched the knowledge about underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of micro-foundation of CSR.Finally,the implications towards theory and managerial pactices were discussed.