Can Corporate Social Responsibility Promote Employees’ Taking Charge? The Mediating Role of Thriving at Work and the Moderating Role of Task Significance

Abstract

There is growing evidence to suggest that employees’ perceptions of their employer’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) positively influences their attitude and behavior. An increasing number of scholars have called for further explorations of the microfoundations of CSR. To that end, this study takes the conservation of resources perspective to examine relationships and the perception of CSR by employees, considering areas such as thriving at work, task significance, and employees taking charge. By analyzing 444 questionnaires completed by employees in China and using the conditional process analysis to test a hypothesis, results showed that the association between employees’ CSR perception and taking charge is significantly and positively correlated, with thriving at work mediating the connection. We also found that task significance negatively moderates the mediating effect between CSR and taking charge, such that the lower the level of task significance of a job, the more positive the effect of CSR on taking charge via thriving at work. These findings have theoretical implications for micro-level CSR research and managerial implications for entrepreneurs.

Synthesizing the affinity between employees' internal‐external CSR perceptions and work outcomes: A meta‐analytic investigation

“…The extant literature has largely overlooked the emotion‐laden outcomes of CSR that can play a vital role in shaping employees' work attitudes and behaviors; for instance, meaningfulness (Supanti & Butcher, 2019), desire to create significant impact through work (Farooq & Salam, 2020; Shahzadi et al, 2020), respect (Farooq et al, 2017), self‐esteem (Gond et al, 2017), felt obligation (Eisenberger et al, 2001), moral attentiveness (Uckun et al, 2020), and thriving at work (Yan et al, 2021), requiring further research to unpack the ingrained effects of CSR on employees' psychological and emotional well‐being.…”

Do Embedded and Peripheral Corporate Social Responsibility Activities Lower Employees’ Turnover Intentions?

“…This primarily means that anything that can induce an OCB in the employees of a firm will lead to lower turnover intentions of those employees including peripheral CSR. Therefore, retaining employees for longer periods will demand firms to work on OCB at their workplace (Yan et al, 2021). An organization comprises people and their retention is foremost important for successful organizations, as employee turnover is a very costly phenomenon for the organizations (Aguilera et al, 2007).…”

“…The general trend of organizational CSR initiatives results in favorable employee-oriented organizational outcomes (Burbano, 2016;Flammer and Luo, 2017;Yan et al, 2021). Carnahan et al (2017) has discussed two main reasons for the CSR activities that result in higher retention of employees.…”

Can resilience promote calling among Chinese nurses in intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic? The mediating role of thriving at work and moderating role of ethical leadership

“…Responses were scored on a five-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The sample item is “I am looking forward to each new day.” Furthermore, according to a previous empirical study on thriving at work, although it has two dimensions, scholars usually calculate the average score for subsequent analysis (Yan et al, 2021 ). A higher score indicates a higher thriving at work of nurses.…”