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Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethical Leadership: Investigating Their Interactive Effect on Employees’ Socially Responsible Behaviors

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Abstract

This research investigates the interlinkage between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethical leadership in inducing employees’ socially responsible behaviors (SRBs). Specifically, building on organizational identification theory and cue consistency theory, we develop and test an integrated moderated mediation framework in which employees’ perception of ethical leadership moderates the mediating mechanism between their perceptions of CSR (i.e., perceived CSR–environment and perceived CSR–community), organizational identification, and SRBs (i.e., green and societal behaviors). The findings highlight the need for consistency between employees’ perceptions of CSR and ethical leadership to foster their propensity to further social good through relationship-building activities with their organization. The results, which largely verify the theoretical framework, contribute to and have implications for both research and practice.

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Notes

  1. This concept thus differs from related constructs focused on employees’ discretionary behaviors toward coworkers or the organization itself (e.g., OCB, pro-social behaviors). SRB is also cast under the labels of employee engagement in CSR (Slack et al. 2015), extra-role CSR performance (Vlachos et al. 2014), and OCB targeting external stakeholders (e.g., OCB toward the environment; see Daily et al. 2009).

Abbreviations

AVE:

Average variances extracted

CFA:

Confirmatory factor analysis

CSR:

Corporate social responsibility

OB:

Organizational behavior

OCB:

Organizational citizenship behavior

SIP:

Social information processing

SRBs:

Socially responsible behaviors

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont, 55 Colchester Ave., Kalkin Hall, Burlington, VT, 05405, USA

    Kenneth De Roeck

  2. KEDGE Business School, Domaine de Luminy, BP 921, 13288, Marseille Cedex 9, France

    Omer Farooq

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  1. Kenneth De Roeck
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Correspondence to Kenneth De Roeck.

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Authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Authors have full control of all primary data and agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Question items and their factor loading obtained from CFA using AMOS
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Appendix 2

See Table 7.

Table 7 Summary of the results of hypotheses testing
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De Roeck, K., Farooq, O. Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethical Leadership: Investigating Their Interactive Effect on Employees’ Socially Responsible Behaviors. J Bus Ethics 151, 923–939 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3656-6

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