“It’s Like Hating Puppies!” Employee Disengagement and Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been linked with numerous organizational advantages, including recruitment, retention, productivity, and morale, which relate specifically to employees. However, despite specific benefits of CSR relating to employees and their importance as a stakeholder group, it is noteworthy that a lack of attention has been paid to the individual level of analysis with CSR primarily being studied at the organizational level. Both research and practice of CSR have largely treated the individual organization as a “black box,” failing to account for individual differences amongst employees and the resulting variations in antecedents to CSR engagement or disengagement. This is further exacerbated by the tendency in stakeholder theory to homogenize priorities within a single stakeholder group. In response, utilizing case study data drawn from three multinational tourism and hospitality organizations, combined with extensive interview data collected from CSR leaders, industry professionals, engaged, and disengaged employees, this exploratory research produces a finer-grained understanding of employees as a stakeholder group, identifying a number of opportunities and barriers for individual employee engagement in CSR interventions. This research proposes that employees are situated along a spectrum of engagement from actively engaged to actively disengaged. While there are some common drivers of engagement across the entire spectrum of employees, differences also exist depending on the degree to which employees, rather than senior management, support corporate responsibility within their organizations. Key antecedents to CSR engagement that vary depending on employees’ existing level of broader engagement include organizational culture, CSR intervention design, employee CSR perceptions, and the observed benefits of participation

Capturing CSR: Doing Good Offshore

Global monitoring, and other drivers of high level reporting standards, have brought increasing pressure to embed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the day-to-day operations of many multi-national companies. This move toward overt and targeted CSR responses and public reporting is prompting the strategic alignment of CSR with core business. Although driven in part by regulation, CSR initiatives and practice help demonstrate the moral authority of the corporate citizen. Practicing and publicly reporting CSR, presents an organization as ethical and worthy of trust, and in doing so, captures the good will, empathy and trust of stakeholders especially clients, customers and labor, in home countries. The development and maintenance of trust is integral to offshoring success. This research questions how the strategic practice of CSR by organizations, operating global in-house centers (GICs), contributes to relationship management in OBPO by positioning staff in GICs as stakeholders