Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions as a positive signal to stakeholders that a firm is a responsible corporate citizen. However, CSR is increasingly becoming an ambiguous signal of organizational goodwill because many companies engage in CSR purely out of self-interest, rather than genuine altruism. In this paper, we integrate attribution theory with signaling theory to explore how stakeholders react when they receive additional signals that contradict the company’s intended positive CSR signal. Specifically, we argue that morally questionable CEO ethics in the media negatively influences stakeholders’ CSR motive attributions, which in turn results in increased cynicism that ultimately impacts CSR support intentions and behaviors. We find support for our hypotheses in a quasi-experimental study of stakeholder media exposure to different types of CEOs (morally questionable, ethical, and ethics-unknown). Our findings demonstrate that stakeholders consider CEO ethics an important signal of CSR motives, and will shun the CSR initiatives of morally questionable CEOs.
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Notes
One example of corporate attempts to generate interest and publicity with CSR initiatives occurred on March 3, 2016, when sixteen organizations, including Google, eBay, and JetBlue, formed an alliance to tackle illegal trafficking of endangered wildlife.
It is conceivable that participants who are currently working, compared to those not working, were more aware of the business environment by virtue of their embeddedness within an organization (34.3 % of the sample were currently working). It is further conceivable that participants in more senior years of their studies are more aware of the business environment by virtue of their learning during their business studies compared to those in earlier years of their studies (participants program year: 1.4 % in year one; 22.5 % in year two; 19.2 % in year three, 40.4 % in year four; 16.4 % in an MBA program). If this was the case, we would expect unemployed and junior-year participants to interpret signals sent by the organization differently. Counter to this possibility, there were no significant relationships between these demographic variables and the constructs of interest in this study. As such, we are confident that our full sample may be considered stakeholders that are equally influenced by interactions with companies in the public domain.
We tested an alternate, partially mediated model that links CEO leadership ethics directly to organizational cynicism and the dependent variables. In this model, instrumental and moral motive attributions were also linked directly to the dependent variables. This partial mediation model demonstrated great fit to the data, χ 2 (112) = 165.82, p < 0.01, Δχ 2 (112) = 36.17, p < 0.01. However, this model resulted in very modest improvements in the fit indices, ΔCFI = 0.018, ΔTLI = 0.016, and ΔRMSEA = 0.005. Moreover, some of the results in the partially mediated model are less easily interpretable. For example, the negative link between organizational cynicism and volunteer intentions—observed in the correlation matrix and the fully mediated model—becomes positive in the partial model. Moreover, organizational cynicism, the only significant predictor of donation behavior—observed in the correlation matrix and the fully mediated model—becomes marginally significant (β = − 0.51, p = 0.09) in the partially mediated model. For these reasons, we opted for our hypothesized fully mediated model, which is the more parsimonious and interpretable of the two. This is in line with the rule of thumb in the SEM literature that more parsimonious models with fewer estimated parameters are better than more complex models (e.g., Bentler and Mooijaart 1989; Kumar and Sharma 1999). This rule of thumb is particularly important if the parsimonious model is most closely aligned with the proposed theoretical model and if the less parsimonious model offers minimal gains in model fit indicators.
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Ogunfowora, B., Stackhouse, M. & Oh, WY. Media Depictions of CEO Ethics and Stakeholder Support of CSR Initiatives: The Mediating Roles of CSR Motive Attributions and Cynicism. J Bus Ethics 150, 525–540 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3173-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3173-z