Corporate Social Responsibility and Employees Motivation—Broadening the Perspective

The impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance is an important issue in organizational research and has been discussed for decades. Only lately, scholars turned their attention towards aspects on an individual level, like the relation between CSR and work satisfaction or work engagement. However, still our understanding of how CSR activities shape organizational outcomes by affecting employees’ motivation remains piecemeal. The present paper adds to this stream by analyzing the impact of CSR activities on employees’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Findings indicate that CSR activities both on a firm and on a supra-organizational level have a positive impact on intrinsic motivation, while not affecting extrinsic motivation, i.e. CSR neither fosters nor impedes extrinsic motivation. As a consequence the commitment to CSR can be applied as an effective instrument to induce intrinsic motivation without compromising extrinsic motivation. Furthermore, results point to a non-additive impact of CSR engagement at both levels, which indicates a complex joint impact of CSR engagement on different organizational levels on employees’ intrinsic motivation.