Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is conceptualized as the construct describing the relationship between companies and society. Although scholars reached an agreement about the linkages between CSR in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and psychosocial issues – social identity, organizational culture and commitment – it is still a problematic issue how CSR should be defined and how companies could behave as socially responsible. The authors hypothesize that psychosocial processes impact the activation of CSR. Within a psychological perspective, the purpose of this paper is to explore CSR definitions and CSR psychosocial dimensions.
According to an emic perspective oriented at in‐depth comprehension of phenomena, the authors adopted the grounded theory methodology to collect, analyze and discuss the data. In total, 14 entrepreneurs and 12 employees of Italian‐Apulian SMEs were interviewed on three thematic areas: organizational culture; sense of community; and CSR. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed through qualitative content analysis.
Results showed that: CSR definitions were continuously mediated by participants' organizational culture; and perspective taking, care taking and sustainable practices emerged as the salient CSR psychosocial components, correspondent to its cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions.
The paper argues that CSR psychosocial components could be the strategic variables to develop and to manage CSR in organizations.
CSR is re‐conceptualized as a psychosocial multidimensional construct, explaining its dynamic activation in organizations. The authors suggest that the cognitive and affective dimensions are antecedent to the behavioral dimension. Thus, the authors are developing a CSR psychosocial scale to study the linkages among these dimensions and other variables through quantitative analysis method.
