Employees’ perceptions of CSR practices: to what extent do observers value efforts made by companies in implementing embedded CSR?

Details

Supervisors

Hericher, Corentin

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enThis master’s thesis examines the moral judgements made about companies when they perform Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. It investigates how the perceived effort required to implement different types of CSR – peripheral (external to core business) versus embedded CSR (integrated into core operations) – influences an organization’s perceived morality. Drawing on social evaluations, the study focuses on perceptions of warmth to measure morality and on competence. Based on an experimental design, the results show no direct effect of CSR type on either warmth or competence perceptions. However, it provides empirical support for the idea that embedded CSR is more related to perceived effort than peripheral CSR, and that this predicts higher warmth judgements. These results suggest the relationship between the nature of CSR and the perception of firms’ morality is fully mediated by the perceived effort. These findings contribute to the micro-CSR literature by emphasizing the role of perceived effort as a key mediating mechanism and highlighting it as a mechanism underlying the moral evaluation of organizations.