University of California Irvine, USA

The Affective and Behavioral Consequences of Employee Participation in Corporate Social Responsibility: Field Experimental Evidence

• View Florencio's summary

Abstract

Corporations around the world increasingly implement socially responsible programs and policies. Using a field experiment as part of the new-employee orientation process of 221 employees in a large bank, this study uses random assignment to evaluate whether participation in a CSR intervention influences employees’ enduring emotions (organizational pride, organizational gratitude, and workplace empathy) and subsequent engagement in corporate volunteering activities. Employees randomly assigned to the CSR treatment were more likely to become corporate volunteers and engaged more frequently in subsequent corporate volunteering initiatives than employees in the control condition. Treated employees reported higher levels of organizational pride and workplace empathy, but not of organizational gratitude. While workplace empathy explained the effects of the CSR activity on employees’ subsequent likelihood and frequency of volunteering, organizational pride explained part of the impact on employees' volunteering frequency. This study offers contributions to the literature on CSR, corporate volunteering, and emotions in work-life. 

Biography

Florencio is a Ph.D. Candidate in Management at the University of California, Irvine. His identity as a scholar is tied to the study of corporate social responsibility (CSR), business ethics, and individual differences and emotions. With his work on CSR, Florencio strives to go beyond the “business case” for CSR to examine how different types of CSR can foster the critical global imperative of social and environmental sustainability. He frequently collaborates with both non-profit and for-profit organizations across the Americas to design and evaluate employee-centered CSR initiatives, such as corporate volunteering programs. For example, in one of his field experiments, he designed an alternative onboarding process for employees in a large bank to examine the specific mechanisms linking employee participation in CSR to subsequent engagement in corporate volunteering programs. Florencio has also worked as the executive director for a non-profit and a CSR manager for a large bank.