Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has always been a common concern of society and academia, most previous studies have focused on the organization’s macro-level policies and practice while ignoring the important micro-foundations of CSR...
Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has always been a common concern of society and academia, most previous studies have focused on the organization’s macro-level policies and practice while ignoring the important micro-foundations of CSR such as employees. As employees continue to play an increasingly prominent role in CSR initiatives in recent years, scholars have begun to pay more attention to employee-centered CSR practice. Given that human resource management (HRM) has always been an important link between the organization and employees, they are gradually applying the concept of CSR into HRM practice, and then carrying out research on socially responsible human resource management (SRHRM).
However, given its status as an emerging interdisciplinary concept, the empirical study of SRHRM remains in its infancy, meaning there remain some important issues to be discussed in depth. Especially in the current situation that many enterprises are presented with the important challenge of how to effectively motivate employees to actively participate in CSR initiatives and proactively perform socially responsible behaviors in the workplace, it is of great significance to examine whether SRHRM, as an important tool for successful CSR initiatives, can affect employees’ social responsibility related behaviors.
With that in mind, this study focused on the environmental issues and ethics issues that are currently of great concern to society, introducing organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) into the research framework, such introductions would facilitate an exploration of the impact of SRHRM on these two types of employee behaviors, both closely related to social responsibility, to be undertaken. Based on proactive motivation theory, a moderated multiple-mediation model was further proposed by selecting moral efficacy, felt obligation and empathy as the mediators, while selecting supervisor bottom-line mentality (BLM) as the moderator. Statistical analysis software including SPSS 25.0, Process macro 3.4 and Amos 23.0 were then used to conduct empirical research on a data sample comprised of 535 employees from 23 manufacturing companies in China. The results of empirical analysis in this study are as follows.
First, the results showed that SRHRM had a significantly positive effect on OCBE and a significantly negative effect on UPB. Second, it was found that moral efficacy, felt obligation and empathy significantly mediated the effects of SRHRM on OCBE and UPB, and that there was no significant difference among the three mediation paths. Third, it has been shown that supervisor BLM played a significantly negative moderating role on the positive influence relationship of SRHRM on felt obligation and empathy but still failed to significantly moderate the positive effect of SRHRM on moral efficacy. Fourth, supervisor BLM has also been verified to negatively moderate the mediating effects of felt obligation and empathy in the influence relationship of SRHRM on OCBE and UPB but failed to play a significant moderating role in mediating the effect of moral efficacy on the influence relationship of SRHRM on OCBE and UPB.
The findings in this study fill in the gaps left by previous studies on SRHRM and highlight implications for organizations effectively promoting CSR initiatives in HRM practice and managing employees’ social responsibility related behaviors, including environmental behaviors like OCBE and unethical behaviors like UPB. Lastly, the limitations of this study and the possible future research directions have been discussed.