HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT BENEFITS OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

With the escalating climate and health crises, the relevance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), unlike its business benefits, is now ever more evident. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize and assess the extant literature on the topic of the Human Resource Management (HRM) benefits of CSR so as to provide for a better understanding of this topic. Methodology. The paper is a review of the 1. theoretical frameworks, 2. descriptive research examining employees’ perceptions of and attitudes towards CSR, 3. empirical studies aimed at establishing a causal relationship between CSR and different organizational benefits in the area of human resource management, as well as 4. meta-analytical studies. A range of online databases were searched to collect research papers from various journals and market research publications. Findings. The results show that CSR derives different desirable organizational outcomes such as employee attraction, increased job satisfaction, increased work engagement, employee loyalty and organizational citizenship behavior. Two broad categories are drawn, namely, external (directed towards outside the company) and internal (directed towards the employees) CSR benefits, mainly based on the different theoretical frameworks used to explain their link. Moreover, a lack of research in the developing countries is identified which calls for further inquiry to account for contextual peculiarities which might impact on the CSR practice, perceptions and/ or outcomes in this region. Implications. This paper will be useful for scholars to analyze the current nature of academic research in this area and will provide an added advantage to managers for understanding the impact of CSR activities on employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Value/ originality. To the author’s best knowledge, this is the first literature review on different HRM benefits of both internal and external CSR, and it provides a bibliography of academic literature from 1977 to 2020.