Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices can increase firm attractiveness, this process can be undermined if CSR activities signal the “wrong” motives to job seekers. Yet, how these attributed motives form, and why job seekers are likely to infer favorable or unfavorable causal attributions underlying CSR activity, remain open questions. We draw on Kelley’s covariation model to address this gap. We develop and test an attributional model exploring job seekers’ reactions to distinct CSR attributional configurations derived from job seekers’ perceptions of CSR consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. Across a multi-trait, multi-method, multi-sample series of four studies, we demonstrate that different CSR attributional configurations are related to discrete causal attributions (i.e. values-driven, strategic-driven, and egoistic-driven), which are associated with distinct perceptions and employment intentions. We address recent calls to open the “black box” of CSR causal attributions, deepening understanding of why job seekers might also respond negatively to CSR, and the (attributional) psychological processes driving these negative reactions.
How organizations utilize capabilities to achieve competitive advantage and improve performance has received an abundance of scholarly attention. Both ordinary and dynamic capabilities (DC) enable organizations to achieve higher performance when leveraged appropriately and under favorable conditions. The complexity of an organization's motives for why and how different capabilities are acquired drives us further to explore what complementarities organizations might achieve and under what contexts. Specifically, we explore how firms engaging in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to acquire dynamic and/or ordinary capabilities experience different market reactions and levels of short- and long-run value creation given environmental uncertainty. Our results support the acquisition of ordinary capabilities for predicting positive short-term market reactions and of DC for longer-run firm performance post-M&A, with uncertainty factors moderating these relationships. We discuss both the theoretical and practical implications of uncertainty and acquisitions of these capabilities and offer suggestions for future research.
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