The psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility: A person‐centric systematic review

• Author: Nishat Babu,Jean‐Pascal Gond,Assâad El Akremi,Valérie Swaen
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• Date: 01 February 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2170

The psychological microfoundations of corporate

social responsibility: A person-centric systematic

review

JEAN-PASCAL GOND

1

*, ASSÂAD EL AKREMI

2

, VALÉRIE SWAEN

3

AND NISHAT BABU

4

1

Cass Business School, City, University of London, London, U.K.

2

Université Toulouse-Capitole, CRM, Toulouse,France

3

Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium and IESEG School of Management (LEM CNRS - UMR

9221), Lille, France

4

Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, U.K.

Summary This article aims to consolidate the psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR)

by taking stock and evaluating the recent surge of person-focused CSR research. With a systematic review,

the authors identify, synthesize, and organize three streams of micro-CSR studies—focused on (i) individual

drivers of CSR engagement, (ii) individual processes of CSR evaluations, and (iii) individual reactions to

CSR initiatives—into a coherent behavioral framework. This review highlights significant gaps, methodolog-

ical issues, and imbalances in the treatment of the three components in prior micro-CSR research. It uncovers

the need to conceptualize how multiple drivers of CSR interact and how the plurality of mechanisms and

boundary conditions that can explain individual reactions to CSR might be integrated theoretically. By

organizing micro-CSR studies into a coherent framework, this review also reveals the lack of connections

within and between substreams of micro-CSR research; to tackle them, this article proposes an agenda for

further research, focused on six key challenges. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility; drivers; evaluations; reactions; microfoundations

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a prominent academic concept, defined as “context-specific organizational

actions and policies that take into account stakeholders’expectations and the triple bottom line of economic, social,

and environmental performance”(Aguinis, 2011, p. 858). Although prior CSR studies focus on organizations rather

than individuals (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012), recent research has broadened this agenda by analyzing the psycholog-

ical microfoundations of CSR (or micro-CSR)—that is, by studying how CSR affects individuals (Rupp & Mallory,

2015). In the past 5 years, we find rapid expansions of such studies in CSR, human resource management (HRM),

and organizational behavior (OB) research domains (El Akremi, Gond, Swaen, De Roeck, & Igalens, 2015;

Morgeson, Aguinis, Waldman, & Siegel, 2013; Rupp, 2011), including special issues devoted to CSR and related

topics in prominent OB and HRM journals (e.g., Group & Organization Management, 2015; Journal of Organiza-

tional Behavior, 2013; Personnel Psychology, 2013).

Although stimulating, this vitality of micro-CSR research across multiple disciplines creates a risk of fragmenta-

tion and biased allocations of research efforts (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013; Glavas, 2016). To address these two

*Correspondence to: Jean-Pascal Gond, Cass Business School, City University London, 106 Bunhill Row, EC1Y 8TZ, London, UK. E-mail: jean-

pascal.gond.1@city.ac.uk

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 15 January 2013

Revised 8 November 2016, Accepted 28 November 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 225–246 (2017)

Published online 10 January 2017 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2170

The IRIOP Annual Review Issue

concerns, the current review seeks to map, consolidate, and extend current knowledge about micro-CSR. We

systematically review both conceptual and empirical micro-CSR studies, and we adopt a “person-centric”rather than

“employee-centric”perspective, in which we consider persons other than employees, both within (e.g., executives

and middle managers) and outside (e.g., job seekers and prospect employees) the organization. In this review, we

identify three core components that provide foundations for prior studies of how CSR affects individuals: drivers

(what drives CSR engagement?), evaluations (which cognitive and affective processes underlie people’s evaluations

of CSR initiatives?), and reactions (how, why, and when do individuals react to CSR initiatives?). We further

unpack reactions to CSR by considering the mechanisms that underlie them (why), their boundary conditions

(when), and their outcomes (how). In the Supporting Information, we provide an overview of prior studies and

distinguish the groups of individuals—prospective employees (e.g., job seekers), employees (e.g., administrative

staff), managers (e.g., middle managers), or executives (e.g., chief executive officers [CEOs] and chief financial

officers)—considered in each study.

1

With this systematic review, not only do we extend prior micro-CSR research (Glavas, 2016; Rupp, Ganapathi,

Aguilera, & Williams, 2006; Rupp & Mallory, 2015), but we also derive an agenda for ongoing micro-CSR re-

search, focused on six key challenges: (i) exploring interactions among the drivers of CSR, (ii) pursuing construct

clarification and valid measure development, (iii) bridging the various mechanisms of reactions to CSR, (iv) consid-

ering new and more relevant individual differences that operate as drivers of or boundary conditions on reactions to

CSR, (v) expanding analyses of outcomes of reactions to CSR, and (vi) incorporating individual-level dynamics and

learning processes.

A Person-Centric View of Corporate Social Responsibility

Psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility

To move beyond a traditional focus on institutional or organizational levels of analysis (for detailed reviews, see

Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; Bansal & Song, 2017), micro-CSR scholars suggest integrating organizational psychology

and OB with CSR insights (Jones & Rupp, 2014). Micro-CSR is “the study of the effects and experiences of CSR

(however it is defined) on individuals (in any stakeholder group) as examined at the individual level of analysis”

(Rupp & Mallory, 2015, p. 216). We position our review in this growing stream of research that acknowledges

individuals’psychological experience of CSR initiatives undertaken by organizations (i.e., actions, programs, and

policies) and supports consideration of different categories of individuals within and around organizations. Although

Rupp and Mallory (2015) suggest extending the boundaries of micro-CSR to any individual member of stakeholder

groups, within or outside the organization (e.g., consumers, investors, and community members), we adopt a

narrower “person-centric perspective”and focus on prospective and incumbent employees, including job seekers,

managers, and executives.

Prior reviews mainly focus on the effect of CSR on employees, such that they address the set of processes that we

refer to as individual reactions to CSR. They uncover both CSR-related outcomes and individual-level psychological

mechanisms (mediators) and boundary conditions (moderators) of those outcomes (Glavas, 2016; Rupp & Mallory,

2015). This focus has been insightful but also has led to the relative neglect of individual-level antecedents (predic-

tors) of CSR engagement (Aguilera, Rupp, Williams, & Ganapathi, 2007; Aguinis & Glavas, 2012), or what we

might call individual drivers of CSR. It ignores the interpretative processes by which people form and organize their

perceptions of CSR initiatives (framing of CSR perceptions); reflect cognitively on, appraise the worth, and attribute

CSR initiatives to some causes (CSR causal attribution); make sense of meaning (CSR sensemaking); and

1

The full set of tables that presents prior micro-CSR studies is provided as a permanent Supporting Information. We encourage our readers to

download this Supporting Information and to use it while reading this paper, especially Supporting Information Tables A2-1 to A2-5.

226 J.-P. GOND ET AL.

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 225–246 (2017)

DOI: 10.1002/job