The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating role of employees’ self-experienced social responsibility perceptions in the relationship between employees’ community- and environment-oriented social responsibility perceptions and trust in an organization.
The corporate social responsibility (CSR) construct is examined in the context of stakeholders including the community, environment and employees. The study was carried out with 438 questionnaires gathered from four- and five-star hotels operating in Alanya, Turkey. The proposed model was tested with the partial least squares method of structural equation modeling. Multiple group analysis was performed to test the moderating effect.
Findings reveal that employees’ community- and environment-oriented social responsibility perceptions have a positive effect on trust in the organization. Based on the results of multigroup analysis, the effect of employees’ community-oriented social responsibility perceptions on trust in the organization was determined to be more prominent in the group of employees with high self-experienced social responsibility perceptions. However, the same moderating effect could not be determined in relation to environment-oriented social responsibility perceptions and trust in the organization.
Studies focusing on CSR activities were mainly examined at the macro level. Internal stakeholders’ returns to these activities were not sufficiently considered. Contrary to previous studies that examine the link between CSR perceptions measured with Carroll’s pyramid dimensions and organizational trust, the current study examined CSR perceptions with the stakeholder approach. Moreover, the study discovered one of the variables defined as the black box that differentiates the returns that employees provide to CSR activities.
