Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widespread in the commercial world, but companies often face suspicion regarding the latent motivation behind their CSR activities. How can firms make outside observers perceive their CSR as authentic and gain trust? Instead of focusing on CSR content and activities, we look into an organization’s intrinsic sensemaking process of CSR. Identity orientation, legitimacy, and posture are identified as three important attributes that reflect firms’ mental frame regarding CSR. We demonstrate type-by-type links among these sensemaking attributes and build configurations of CSR profiles to explore how these attributes work in combination to help firms gain trust from outside observers. Two scenario experiments are employed to test our hypotheses. The results indicate that observers’ trust is high when these three attributes are perceived as consistently and coherently underlying firms’ CSR activities. Specifically, when individual identity orientation is configured with pragmatic legitimacy and a defensive posture or when relational identity orientation is configured with moral legitimacy and a tentative posture, observers’ trust can be enhanced.
Highlights
The strategic view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emphasizes the benefits of CSR for a company’s reputation, goodwill, and stakeholder support and the company’s bottom-line performance [1,2]
Before we build configurations based on the whole sensemaking process, we argue that there are interactive relationships between identity orientation and legitimacy
We develop three hypotheses by supplementing the relationships predicted in Hypotheses 1–3 regarding the relationships between trust and perceived corporate traits from the CSR sensemaking process
Summary
The strategic view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emphasizes the benefits of CSR for a company’s reputation, goodwill, and stakeholder support and the company’s bottom-line performance [1,2]. The empirical agenda for CSR research could involve investigating whether or not firms that display, for example, an individualistic identity orientation tend to rely on pragmatic legitimacy and have a defensive posture to generate a significant influence on their CSR performance and social acceptance We configure these three dimensions under the sensemaking process and relate them to an organizational outcome (trust) from observers’ perception. In keeping with Hypothesis 2, relational identity orientation signals the importance of moral legitimacy Combining these two cognitive sensemaking dimensions, organizations are perceived to cognize themselves as a “trusted partner” and as “doing the right thing” in a way that is consistent with influential groups and social norms [9,16]. We administered a survey (Study2), involving the judgement of companies’ posture and observers’ trust, to test Hypotheses 4–6
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