Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

1-2018

Abstract

Scholars have proposed that organizations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts are often positively associated with employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and have invoked identity-based mechanisms to explain this relationship. Complementing these perspectives, we develop a CSR sensitivity framework that explains how task significance, a micro-level job characteristic, can sensitize employees to their organizations’ macro-level CSR efforts, thereby strengthening the association between CSR and OCB. Across three field studies, we find that CSR and task significance interact to predict OCB, such that an organization’s CSR is more positively associated with OCB among employees who report higher task significance than among those who report lower task significance. Furthermore, we find support for prosocial motivation as a mediator of this interactive effect, but we do not find evidence for several alternative mediators. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on CSR, job design, and other-oriented approaches to organizational behavior.

Keywords

OCB, Prosocial behavior, Corporate social responsibility, Task significance, Prosocial motivation

Discipline

Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics | Organizational Behavior and Theory

Research Areas

Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources

Publication

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Volume

144

First Page

44

Last Page

59

ISSN

0749-5978

Identifier

10.1016/j.obhdp.2017.09.006

Publisher

Elsevier

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2017.09.006

Download

Share

COinS