Mixed Motives for Doing Good: The Effect of Profit Motives in CSR Initiatives on Employee Opportunism

ABSTRACT This paper examines how mixing profit motives into corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives influences employee opportunism. In an online experiment, workers are randomly assigned to one of three employer initiatives: a profit-motivated business initiative with no CSR component, a purely charitable CSR initiative, or a mixed-motive CSR initiative. Workers then complete a real-effort task with the opportunity to shirk. We find that employees shirk more under mixed-motive CSR than under purely charitable CSR or a profit-motivated business initiative without CSR. This pattern is partly explained by differences in employees’ moral perceptions of the employer. Workers form more favorable moral perceptions under purely charitable CSR, whereas their moral perceptions under mixed-motive CSR are similar to those formed under the business initiative without CSR. These findings suggest that mixing profit motives in CSR weakens the moral signal of CSR and undermines its internal behavioral benefits. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request. JEL Classifications: M140; D84; D91.