Mind the Gap! A Moderated Serial Mediation of the Discrepancy between Employees' Perceived Internal-External CSR on Proactive Behavior and Turnover Intention

Abstract

noneAs organization resource is always denoted in the notion of scarcity, multiple demands have to strive for the same units of resources. Recent micro-corporate social responsibility (CSR) studies assessed the employees’ perceived CSR through a multidimensional lens by differentiating the targeted beneficiary stakeholders. Despite prior literature demonstrated perceived internal and external CSR exhibited differential and varying degrees of impacts on employees respectively, the matters on whether the (in)equivalence of employees perceived internal and external CSR implemented by the company affected their attitudes and behaviors were noticeably absent in the literature. Building upon social exchange theory, this study explored how the employees reciprocated to the impact of the discrepancy between perceived internal-external CSR on their proactive behavior and turnover intention. Adopting a two-wave survey approach, 271 responses were collected from incumbent full-time employees with at least one-year organizational tenure working in diverse organizations in Taiwan. The results discovered that the employees perceived external CSR significantly outweighed their perceived internal CSR. The discrepancy between perceived internal-external CSR negatively associated with employees’ proactive behavior and positively associated with turnover intention via the sequential mediation of psychological contract breach and job embeddedness. There was a significant moderating effect by perceived overall justice on the relationships such that the indirect effect of the discrepancy between perceived internal-external CSR on employees’ proactive behavior and turnover intention via psychological contract breach and job embeddedness were only pronounced among employees with high perceived overall justice. The academic and practical contributions were also discussed.