No Place for Pointless Jobs: How Social Responsibility Impacts Job Performance

Abstract

We address the question of how organizations’ practices of social responsibility impact their employees’ job performance. Independent studies have shown that job performance is influenced by how employees perceive the organization they work for and how they perceive the work they perform for the organization. Moreover, studies on the relationship between social responsibility and job performance have shown that employees’ perceptions of their organization mediate the relationship. What is thus far neglected, however, is whether and how their perceptions of work itself mediate the relationship as well. We derive a sequential mediation model according to which social responsibility improves job performance by contributing to a supportive and trustworthy work context (employees’ perceptions of the organization they work for), in turn promoting work meaningfulness and engagement (employees’ perceptions of work itself). We collect survey data and test the sequential mediation model against a series of alternative models, each of which challenges a specific assumption of the proposed model. Our model provides the best tradeoff between the accuracy and the parsimony with which it describes the data collected, and is, therefore, expected to generalize best to other data.