Employee perspective on CSR: a review of the literature and research agenda

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been gaining heightened attention from the practitioners and academicians alike. With its roots in macro disciplines such as strategy and corporate governance, most of the research on CSR is available at organizational and institutional level of analysis.

Responding to the call for more micro-level CSR research for a more holistic understanding of the concept, as highlighted by Aguinis and Glavas (2012), an increasing number of research studies focusing at individual level of analysis have come up in the recent years. Early micro-level CSR studies focused mainly on external stakeholders such as investors and customers ignoring internal organizational stakeholders i.e. employees. Since then, there has been an explosive increase in employee centric research concentrating around how CSR influences and is influenced by internal members of the organization (Jones et al., 2018). With the proliferation of employee focused studies in the CSR stream leading to a significant body of research to draw upon, we realize that this is the right time to present a comprehensive review of available research to advance the current understanding (what we know), point research gaps (what is not known) and guide future research (what still remains to be known) in this direction. The time is ripe for raising new questions of theoretical and practical relevance for advancing the existing literature more meaningfully.

This paper aims to review the available academic literature on CSR from employees’ perspective with an objective to understand the construct of CSR and clarify the current state of thinking in the area. Specifically, we present:

• the evolution of the concept of CSR beginning with the historical overview to the emergence of recent theory and conceptualizations;

• underlying theoretical foundations of CSR;

• the studied variables for CSR; and

• research gaps and future work avenues in the field of CSR.

Although there have been quite handful review papers on CSR, however each review paper is novel in its approach and has helped the researcher in getting the insight from various perspective on CSR. The aim of the present study is to summarize the various dimensions(outcomes, mediators, moderators, theories) related to CSR in a simplified way so as to help the readers to understand the concept of CSR studied in the past 60 years for future...