Bridging Employees’ Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility, Sense-Making for Meaningfulness, and Work Engagement for Successful Self-Regulation

Abstract

In response to calls for research on the psychological mechanisms, such as perceptions and attitudes toward corporate citizenship, in promoting positive outcomes at work, this research presents a novel approach by empirically testing a calling conditioned path model from P perception of corporate CSR (P-CSR) to work engagement via meaningfulness under the theoretical framework of self-determination theory. Survey data collected from 224 corporate employees in the US were tested using the PROCESS plugin (version 4.3) in SPSS. The regression results supported the positive direct and indirect paths from employees’ P-CSR to meaningfulness and work engagement but not the conditioning effect of calling work orientation. This study’s unique findings, limitations, future research, and implications are discussed, expanding micro-CSR research and unboxing the management assumptions of employees as purposeful autonomous agents seeking consistent interpretations and authentic perceptions of organizational CSR activities during their sense-making processes. Non-confirming of the calling conditioning the path model shed light on it being a dynamic multi-dimensional and multi-level construct to be further researched.

Keywords

• micro-CSR
• work engagement
• calling work orientation