Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Social responsibility at organizational-level and individual-level alike is being actively practiced and is highly noticeable in today’s era. The increased focus towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) has motivated practitioners to actively participate and identify the most profitable approaches. However, such strategic-driven intentions of organizations are readily differentiated by employees from value-driven motives of initiating CSR and is found to affect employees’ job satisfaction and job performance (Story & Neves, 2015; Vlachos, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2013). Moreover, with the growing application of CSR policies by organizations, studying the outcomes CSR leads to, has been highly sought after by researchers. The impact CSR policies have on the reputation of the firm, firm’s financial performance, consumer’s evaluation and choice of products/company, their loyalty, the firm’s position in the market, and firm’s internal capabilities have been extensively studied (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). While CSR policies impacting external stakeholders have been the focus of many CSR-outcome studies, relatively fewer researchers have looked into how CSR policies at an individual-level impact the internal stakeholders, specifically employees (Bolton, Kim, & O'Gorman, 2011).
One such concept that has been studied in terms of CSR’s impact is organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The ideology that exists behind OCB is the discretionary behavior that an employee exhibits in going beyond what is required, in order to contribute to his/her organization (LePine, Erez, & Johnson, 2002). Similarly, CSR also looks at the actions of an organization which indicates its purpose of being socially responsible towards its internal and external stakeholders and doing so usually involves going beyond the firm’s interests and legal requirements (Bolton et al., 2011; McWilliams & Siegel, 2001). Hence, both of these concepts relate to discretionary acts at the employee and organizational level. In spite of OCB being defined as a discretionary act, managers have been found to consider OCB when assessing a subordinate’s performance (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000). Furthermore, organizations upon realizing the importance of other stakeholders (customers, employees, government, society etc.), in addition to shareholders, are now obligated to fulfill their demands of being a socially responsible organization (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001). Hence, employees and organizations likewise have reached a point where such discretionary behavior i.e. OCB and CSR, is now required of them in order to continue survival.
As per the social attribution theory, perceived reality plays a more important role than the actual reality in defining one’s behavior and attitude. In a similar context, Shen and Zhu (2011) posit that an employee’s perception of the organizational policies has a stronger impact than the actual policies itself. Moreover, an employee’s perception of the organization’s CSR initiatives is empirically found to have a positive impact on employee’s OCB (Fu, Ye, & Law, 2014; Jones, 2010; Kim, Rhou, Uysal, & Kwon, 2017; Rupp, Shao, Thornton, & Skarlicki, 2013). While these studies identify the impact of perceived CSR on an employee’s OCB, not much is known in terms of what factors control this relationship. Considering the increasing demand of requiring employees to exhibit OCB and upon knowing that an organization through its CSR policies has the power to affect the extent to which an employee engages in OCB, it becomes crucial to identify the factors that strengthen or weaken this relationship and thereby motivate employees to exercise OCB more frequently.