Abstract
The sustainable development of the environment and society depends not only on firms’ social responsibility initiatives, but also on employees’ socially responsible behavior during their daily work life. Hence, it is important to study why and how employees go about the socially responsible behaviors (SRB), such as environmental protection and charitable donations. Although research has been done on the antecedents of employees’ SRB from personal, contextual and leadership perspectives, little is known about the mechanism through which they affect these behaviors. Moreover, compared with the other two perspectives, research from the leadership perspective is relatively scarce. In this paper, we aim to fill these research gaps. Based on 936 respondents from 109 corporations, we empirically test the cross-level direct effect of ethical leadership on employees’ SRB and the cross-level mediating effect of perceived organizational virtuousness. In our empirical analyses, we adopt statistical methodologies such as hierarchical linear modeling and multilevel mediation analysis. Our results show that perceived organizational virtuousness partly mediates the influence of ethical leadership on employees’ environmental protection and charitable donation. In other words, ethical leadership enables employees to form the perception of organizational virtuousness, and therefore employees are more engaged in environmental protection and charitable donations. This research provides important insights for firms and their employees to become more socially and environmentally responsible.
Highlights
Owing to its important role in the sustainability of environment and societies, corporate social responsibility (CSR), including environmental protection and charitable donations, has become an active research field in the past decades
We propose that ethical leadership haspropose a direct that cross-level leadership has a direct cross-level effect on employees’
The results show the value of statistic Z as 3.664, indicating that the mediating effect of perceived organizational virtuousness (POV) is significant at the level of 0.01
Summary
Owing to its important role in the sustainability of environment and societies, corporate social responsibility (CSR), including environmental protection and charitable donations, has become an active research field in the past decades. Three approaches have been used by scholars to explore. The macro approach of CSR studies treats a firm as a personified independent entity and explores its intentions, initiatives and outcomes to take social responsibility at the organizational level [1]. Wu et al examined the relationship between green CSR and firm innovation performance [2]. Argue that more attention should be paid on the micro level [3]. The micro approach of CSR studies focuses on how employees’
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