I Feel Morally Elevated by My Organization’s CSR, So I Contribute to It

Abstract

While the recent research addressing the micro-foundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has often built on the theory of deontic justice to explain why employees care about their organization’s CSR, the mechanisms underlying this deontic justice path have not yet been examined. To address this gap, we study moral elevation – an other-directed moral emotion that, according to deontic justice theory, could help us understand better why employees may react positively to their organization’s CSR even when this CSR does not offer employees any instrumental or relational benefits. We hypothesize that moral elevation will help explain why CSR targeted at a secondary (as opposed to primary) stakeholder translates into organizational citizenship behavior supporting this CSR. We also examine a boundary condition to this mediation effect as we expect that the deontic justice path will be stronger when employees perceive their organizational identity orientation to match its CSR towards secondary stakeholders. We tested our moderated mediation model with data collected from 298 full-time employees, using a three-wave longitudinal design. Overall, by identifying moral elevation as a mechanism underlying the deontic justice path, our research provides empirical support for the deontic argument that employees care about CSR because CSR is the moral thing to do. Our work also supports the existence of a virtuous circle whereby an organization’s initial investments in CSR targeted at a secondary stakeholder generate larger benefits for this secondary stakeholder because they bring employees to contribute to this CSR, thereby benefiting this stakeholder beyond the initial investments.