"The Power of Ethical Leadership": The Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on Creativity, the Mediating Function of Psychological Safety, and the Moderating Role of Ethical Leadership.

Byung-Jik Kim,Tae-Hyun Kim,Min-Jik Kim

doi:10.3390/ijerph18062968

Abstract

A body of existing literature delves into how corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects employees’ cognition, emotion, and behavior within an organization. These previous studies, however, pay relatively little attention to the influence of CSR on levels of creativity in employees. Considering that creativity is closely related to innovative capability, which is critical for a firm to survive, the relationship between CSR and employees’ creativity and its elaborate underlying processes need further investigation. Based on a group creativity model, we argue that CSR may increase levels of creativity in employees through mediation of enhanced levels of psychological safety in employees. In addition, existing works on CSR have relatively underexplored the contextual role of leadership in translating CSR practices into employees’ attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. Using three-wave time-lagged survey data from 311 employees in South Korea, we found that CSR enhances employees’ creativity via mediation of psychological safety. Additionally, ethical leadership positively moderates the relationship between CSR and psychological safety. Our findings suggest that psychological safety in employees functions as an important underlying mechanism to describe the CSR–employee creativity link. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the importance of the moderating role of ethical leadership in the process of CSR activities.

Highlights

Published: 14 March 2021Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the efforts of firms to enhance the welfare of various stakeholders such as shareholders, employees, customers, local communities, and the environment in operating a business [1,2,3,4,5]
Results of the chi-square difference tests suggested that the partial mediation model (χ2 = 222.70; comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.949; Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.930; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.051) has mediation model (χ2 = 222.70; CFI = 0.949; TLI = 0.930; RMSEA = 0.051) has the the better fit compared to the full mediation model
Our results showed that the bias-corrected confidence interval (CI) for the mean indirect effects on estimatethe theinteraction interaction terms in efficient an efficient wayalso butdecrease decrease multi-collinearity estimate terms in an way but multi-collinearity among the paths did not include zero

Summary

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the efforts of firms to enhance the welfare of various stakeholders such as shareholders, employees, customers, local communities, and the environment in operating a business [1,2,3,4,5]. CSR increases a variety of dimensions of organizational effectiveness, including customer evaluations of the firm and its products, corporate reputation, employees’ positive reactions, and financial performance [4,6,8,9,10,11]. Extant studies have mainly examined the impact of CSR on macrolevel outcomes such as financial performances, product quality, and corporate reputation by focusing on external stakeholders including shareholders, customers, and local communities [12,13,14,15]. Considering that employees are important internal stakeholders who plan, initiate, and implement CSR practices in the first place [13,14,15], investigation of the Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations

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