Abstract
Global surveys indicate that employee engagement costs nearly £70 billion per year in the UK alone with nascent improvement from 2011 to this date. Recognising employee disengagement as a threat to global socio-economic sustainability, experts and scholars offer CSR and employee-centric leadership as practical solutions. Visionary and servant leadership incite superior employee efforts through fair and ethical work values, but past theory and research show limited research on micro-processes that link CSR to employee outcomes. This study tested a value-centered model to examine if the two leadership styles and overall fairness can explain the positive relationship between CSR and extra effort. Data analysis of 512 employee self-reports using the structural equation modelling (SEM), the PROCESS approach and other techniques showed that executive’s CSR values cue to employee visionary and servant leadership, which influence extra effort both directly and indirectly (through overall fairness). Even though employees strongly endorsed the positive influence of universal visionary prototype, overall fairness was more strongly perceived in servant leadership. The paper offers practical implications for organizational theorists and practitioners.
Highlights
Since 2011, Gallup experts have been urging global organisations to adopt employee-focused, fair and spirited leadership to address the issue of employee engagement that costs nearly USD 300 billion globally, and 52–70 billion in the UK
The correlation coefficients supported that stakeholder values (SV) had a significant and positive association with both visionary (VL) and servant leadership (SL), whereas extra effort (EE) showed a significant positive relationship with VL (r = 0.445, p < 0.01) than SL
The study findings from a sample of 512 UK employees suggest that CSR values of executives elicit the perception of visionary and servant leadership among employees, which directly and indirectly generate superior employee extra effort
Summary
Since 2011, Gallup experts have been urging global organisations to adopt employee-focused, fair and spirited leadership to address the issue of employee engagement that costs nearly USD 300 billion globally, and 52–70 billion in the UK. Aguinis and Glavas (2012) identify this gap as the micro-CSR theory, a new field that focuses on the individual actions and interactions that interlink CSR to outcomes. Though two studies have attempted to connect CSR to employee outcomes via visionary and transformational leadership (e.g., de Luque, Washburn, Waldman, & House, 2008; Groves, 2014), advocates of this emerging field criticize top-tier journals for paying but little attention to promoting research on other underresearched micro-processes (antecedents, mediators, and outcomes) that may explain the employee engagement issue (e.g., Glavas, 2016b; Glavas & Kelley, 2014; Rasool & Rajput, 2017)
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