When business goes out of its way to do good: Theorizing postures of organizational benevolence

Abstract

In this article, we establish an integrative conceptual framework for explaining postures of organizational benevolence - i.e., profit- oriented organizations’ deliberate choice and tendency to engage in actions that benefit external constituencies, and where benefiting the ‘other’ is in itself an ultimate goal of action. We distinguish two types of such behavioral tendency: episodic and institutionalized postures of organizational benevolence. Our proposed process model is centrally based on the concept of collective commitment and recent theoretical advances on emotion, cognition, and communication within organizations. We elaborate, in particular, on antecedents - i.e., ‘triggers’ as well as ‘vectors’, internal and external to the organization - that are apt to mobilize collective commitment. Furthermore, we focus on the central mechanisms through which such commitment is successfully sustained over time, and how it is translated, or transformed, into specific postures of organizational benevolence. We...