Driving Employee Engagement through CSR Communication and Employee Perceived Motives: The Role of CSR-Related Social Media Engagement and Job Engagement

Abstract

Employee engagement and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are two important issues attracting an increasing amount of attention from both business communication researchers and practitioners. A theory-driven model that (1) conceptualizes employee engagement as social media engagement, job engagement, and organizational engagement, and (2) explicates how they are related to an organization’s CSR communication strategies and employee perceived CSR motives is still lacking. To place our study in the context of CSR and business communication, we proposed a strategies-motives-employee engagement model. Results from an online Qualtrics survey (n = 836) supported all our hypotheses except for the direct link between interacting CSR communication strategies and employee organizational engagement. We conducted a two-step Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis to test all our hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications of the study were discussed.