Exploring the impact of employee perceptions of CSR on work related behavior with spirituality as a moderator

Abstract

With the passage of Indian Companies Act (2013), a new thrust among the managers and researchers has developed for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) research. The extant literature review on CSR suggests a scarcity of research pertaining to the Indian context, especially in human resource field. At this juncture, we conducted this study on CSR so that managers can utilise this knowledge for framing CSR policies and gaining strategic advantage. This study had three major objectives, firstly to generate knowledge base on CSR, secondly to explore the shared understanding about CSR among employees and prospective employees and finally to assess the impact of CSR perception on employee behaviour. The employee behaviour of interest is Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and Turn over Intention (TI) among employees working in India. In order to achieve our objectives, we conducted the study in two stages. In stage one a total of forty-five in-depth interviews (N = 45) were conducted to explore the understanding about CSR. The interview analysis revealed an important association between CSR and spiritual orientation among employees. In the second stage, motivated by literature review and qualitative study we formulated a conceptual model and hypothesized that CSR perceptions would be positively related to Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and negatively related to Turnover Intention (TI) among employees and individual spirituality would moderate the relationship between CSR perceptions and employee work related behavior such as OCB and TI. In order to test the above hypotheses, we collected data from 257 employees (N = 257) working in manufacturing and service sector in India. Correlational and regression analysis were run using SPSS 20, to test the relationship between the variables. The results revealed support for all the hypotheses. The study proposes several managerial implications and future research directions.