When Corporate Social Responsibility Backfires: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: List, John A.; Momeni, Fatemeh
• 署名单位: University of Chicago
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3540
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 8-21
• 关键词: corporate social responsibility; Natural field experiment; employee; MISBEHAVIOR

摘要

This paper uses a natural field experiment to connect corporate social responsibility (CSR) to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 1,500 workers, we find that our use of CSR increases employee misbehavior-24% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duties when we introduce CSR. Observed data patterns across the treatments are consonant with a model of moral licensing, whereby the doing good nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that is harmful to the firm.