PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

As the world is facing severe challenges such as climate change, organizations strive to contribute to social justice and mitigate their negative impact on the environment. The United Nations has agreed on 17 goals of sustainable development to be achieved by 2030 and organizations can contribute to these goals, for example with policies such as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Up to now, CSR is regarded as a very positive strategy and research construct, among others due to its benefit for employees. Taking a resource perspective, we investigate under which conditions CSR may be perceived as stressful, gaining insights into the dark side of CSR. Based on the conservation of resources theory, we hypothesize that an imbalance of internal and external CSR is associated with stress. In this pre-registered study, we examined the interaction of employees’ (N = 353) perceptions of internal and external CSR, autonomy, and meaningfulness and their relation to stress and work engagement. Results of regression analyses showed that internal and external CSR was positively associated with work engagement and internal CSR was negatively related to stress, whereas external CSR was positively related to stress. Moreover, we found a three-way interaction of meaningfulness, internal and external CSR when predicting stress (B = -.18, p = .02). When external CSR is high, and internal CSR is low (unfavorable distribution of resources for employees), stress is higher for those who derive meaning from their job. Our findings indicate that CSR is not always associated with positive outcomes for employees.