Laying the groundwork for corporate social responsibility: Behavioral ethics in high‐hazard organizations

Abstract

SummaryUsing findings from an inductive study of two high‐hazard organizations and insights from behavioral ethics literature, we build a model illustrating the behavioral foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We show that employees in high‐hazard organizations scrutinize their work, actively deciding how to alter work tasks and boundaries and persevering through obstacles to lay the groundwork for CSR. Central to this process is employee moral awareness—the awareness of one's activities and the consequences those activities may have on others—through which they translate organizational hazards into their work decisions. Our findings further suggest that moral awareness is more dynamic than previously conceptualized, continually assembled, and reassembled through the active exchange and deployment of scientific and moral principles. In contrast to the extant literature that prioritizes the unitary nature of CSR and its top‐down effects, our findings uncover individual‐level ethical decisions as its foundation and identify moral awareness and work scrutinization as mechanisms through which individuals lay the groundwork for CSR.

When morality matters: impact of socially responsible human resource management on unethical behavior

“…Specifically, when employees have higher moral attentiveness, they will pay more attention to moral-related behaviors and are more likely to actively consider the general moral-related concepts that are used to distinguish between moral and immoral (Miao et al 2020). In this vein, when socially responsible human resource management practice conveys moral-related information and encourages employees to conduct moral activities (Iqbal, Shen and Deng 2024;Shen and Benson 2016), employees with higher moral attentiveness are more likely to pay attention to such moral-related information and positively think about and identify such information (Milosevic and Bass 2024). Therefore, they are more likely to absorb such moral values conveyed by socially responsible human resource management and realize the importance of ethics and morality (Reynolds 2008).…”