Corporate Social Responsibility from Employee Perspective - The Influencing Factors and Strategic Implications of Employee Perception

Abstract: Growing global challenges such as poverty and climate change push companies to find new ways to tackle these issues and consequently, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an indispensable priority for business leaders. Furthermore, a correlation between CSR and employee engagement has been identified, and as employees are often considered as one of the most important stakeholders, companies are increasingly utilizing CSR as a tool to strengthen employee engagement. The mediating element in between the two is considered to be whether employees see a firm as a good “corporate citizen” or not. Therefore, this thesis aimed to discover the influencing factors on employee perception of CSR by answering the research question: What factors influence employee perception of corporate social responsibility? The purpose was to contribute to the existing literature – which was strongly based on quantitative research – by exploring employee perception of CSR through in-depth interviews. Thus, a qualitative research approach was selected and a single case study on a multinational information and communications technology (ICT) company was conducted. The analysis of the obtained data was done in the combination of deductive and inductive approach resulting in five themes, which of first two were brought from the literature review and remaining three were extracted from the data. The themes are CSR awareness, employee participation in CSR, managerial aspects, impact of the setting, and personal aspects. Our findings suggest, that there are various different factors influencing employee perception of CSR. More precisely, our research identified 10 factors, and they fall into the aforementioned five themes. By taking into consideration the influencing factors, managers could utilize the findings and develop a more employee-centric CSR strategy and thus, potentially increase the effectiveness of that strategy and moreover, to strengthen employee engagement within the organization.