The Relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Engagement and Its Linkage to Organizational Performance: A Conceptual Model

IntroductionAt this heightened level of competition, no organization can survive without doing well for its employees. In this paper, an attempt is made to study the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and employee engagement, which is regarded as a key to organizational performance. The findings of this paper support the organizations to choose a CSR program that acts as an agent for employee engagement. The term 'corporate social responsibility' is not new in research and has been associated with different disciplines. The essence of CSR differs from one place to another (Daniel and Richard, 2007). CSR has been found to be linked with several diverse disciplines like business, management, marketing and ethics (Cooke and He, 2010). It has been found that the focus of CSR is mainly on organizational performance and the human resource aspect is somewhat ignored (Rettab et al., 2009). Employee engagement can be expected only when the employees are well taken care of. The employee engagement initiatives and its antecedents are identified merely in a few models (Shuck and Wollard, 2010) and hence there is a scope for future work that needs to be carried out in this context. In this paper, an attempt is made to highlight the role of CSR in engaging employees in an organization. Engagement is considered as an important strategic tool to attract, motivate and retain the employees to achieve business success.The relationship between CSR and employee engagement has already been recognized by some practitioners. An article, "The Top 10 Trends in CSR" published online in the year 2012 in Forbes Magazine , emphasizes on the relationship between employee engagement and CSR. The study conducted by Hewitt and Associates (2013) proved that employee engagement increases indulgence in CSR practices. The study included a sam ple of 230 workplaces over 100,000 employees. Relying on such a huge sample, the relationship is highly significant. The study is based on a theoretical framework that includes social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1985) and stakeholder's theory (Freeman, 1983). According to social identity theory, every individual belongs to a particular social group and shares common goals with other group members. The likeliness of success depends on the investment made with the stakeholders (Lindgreen and Swaen, 2010). The paper evaluates a cross-section of academ ic studies, reports and surveys to recognize the role of CSR as an important driver of employee engagement.Purpose of the Study and Research QuestionsIn scholastic circles, CSR has got across the board consideration and has been the subject of exploration (Lee, 2008). On the other hand, the issue of exchanging socially dependable works focusing on employees in multinational enterprises has got for all intents and purposes no consideration. Mankelow (2008) stressed that CSR focussing employees in an organization is practically an unexplored field as various authors have pointed out that employees are the most significant stakeholders of the organization. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the CSR practice that accelerates the engagement level in the workplace and to develop a conceptual model that supports the role of CSR that enhances the engagement level and overall performance of the organization. The research questions are as follows: (1) What are the dimensions of CSR responsible for enhancing the engagement level of employees towards the organization? (2) Is CSR acting as one of the antecedents or predictors of employee engagement? (3) What is the procedure through which CSR and engagement lead to organizational effectiveness? The paper is organized into different sections like methodology, theoretical framework, conceptual model and propositions, and finally offers the conclusion and implications.MethodologyAn integrative literature review method was implied to establish an exploratory framework on the three perspectives-CSR, employee engagement and organizational performance. …