The importance of congruence between stakeholder prosocial motivation and CSR attributions: effects on stakeholders’ donations and sense-making of prosocial identities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Stakeholders’ support is of vital importance to the success of many corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. This study investigates the role of CSR communication in facilitating donation and generating positive attitudes towards corporations, by examining the interaction between stakeholders’ personal prosocial motivations of supporting CSR programs and their attributions of the corporations’ motives behind CSR. An online 2 × 2 factorial experiment with 373 participants found that personal belief-based altruistic motivations and the perceived social corporate motive will lead to the generalization of personal and organizational prosocial identities, stakeholders’ identification with the corporation, and their positive attitude towards the corporation. The findings also attested to the interaction effect between stakeholders’ prosocial motivations and the perceived CSR attributions on subsequent participation in stakeholder-support CSR programs. This study contributed to the existing CSR literature by revealing how corporate factors interact with personal factors to influence CSR outcomes and enriched our understanding of how stakeholder-support CSR programs could benefit for-profit and non-profit sectors at the same time.