How Corporate Social Responsibility Influences Organizational Commitment: a Psychosocial Process Mediated by Organizational Sense of Community

With an increasing economic crisis, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a strategic lever representing a competitive advantage for companies, especially for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Although scholars have analyzed the various dimensions of CSR, the employers’ agency toward CSR, and its impacts on employees’ work attitude, both psychosocial variables and the ability to engage the entire organization in behaving socially responsibly have remained relatively unexplored. Based on the Social Identity Theory framework, the main purpose of this study was to validate a theoretical model of the relationships of influence between CSR, organizational sense of community and business professionals’ commitment. We hypothesized that CSR influences organizational commitment through the mediational impact of organizational sense of community; furthermore, we hypothesized that this indirect relationship would be greater than the direct relationship between CSR and organizational commitment. Moreover, we expected that the linkages between the variables of the psychosocial CSR-based model would be stronger for employers than for employees. To test our hypotheses, 345 business professionals—employers as well as employees who worked in southern Italian SMEs—filled out a questionnaire that included several scales of psychosocial CSR, organizational sense of community and organizational commitment. Structural Equation Modeling analysis confirmed our main hypotheses. Such a psychosocial model allowed us to note some relevant theoretical issues concerning CSR and practical implications that could support human resource management to enhance business professionals’ engagement in corporate socially responsible activities in SMEs. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.