CSR and Employee Engagement Research
Ismael Bena - MBA, Management Consultant, Netherlands, SIG Leader
Hi Teoh, I have conducted a primary research on a similar topic titled "
Corporate Social Responsibility activities and their effects on Employees' Engagement" last year, although with IPA as Qualitative methodology. Here is an abstract:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a rapidly growing field of attention for corporations keen to succeed in the public arena today. Often branded as corporate citizenship (CC), corporations report on their actions, which are demonstrating their social involvement and commitment. They often fail to make the correlation with their core business, with the result that these efforts become non-strategic and without credible involvement of their workforce.
This missing link could have severe impact on the engagement level of employees, which according to various research studies, are becoming increasingly interested to work for those corporations, which demonstrably contribute, to society and the environment. This employee behaviour finds correlation with the definition of ‘self actualization’ as in ‘giving back to society’, which contributes to peoples’ self-worth and pride.
Understanding the CSR levers which can be utilized to drive this behaviour can positively affect employees’ feeling of ‘oneness’ with their organisation and secure their alignment to the corporation’s goals, creating shared values for all stakeholders.
Through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the psychological rationale for employee engagement is evaluated, with the aim to analyse correlations between the rich extant literature and the narrative accounts of the sample group recruited at the Multinational company, Philips Electronic – The Netherlands.
Through semi-structured Narrative Interviews (N.I.), in accordance to the IPA methodology, various B-level executives from Philips’ lighting business unit are interviewed to evaluate their experience, relation, exposure to and involvement with CSR. These N.I.’s took place by telephone and in Dutch (the native language in the Netherlands) to increase the comfort and ease of narrating.
Analysis of the key findings indicated that
corporate structured CSR activities provide the opportunity for organisational members to share in the fame created by others. This contributes to the individual pride and satisfaction factor of employees, which in turn is the basis for employee engagement.
By creating distinctions in the levels of engagement, a connection between ‘flow’ and ‘discretionary effort’ is identified, which often is seen as opposite of one another.
