Corporate social responsibility: A key to foster organisational identification and work engagement

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) plays a crucial role nowadays, both as a strategy for organisational success and as a mean to attain sustainable development. This dissertation aims to analyse the impact of different CSR dimensions – environment and society, employees, customers and consumers, and governments – on Organisational Identification and Work Engagement. Additionally, the aim of this paper is to study the mediating role of Organisational Identification in the relationship between CSR and Work Engagement. Through an online survey, a sample of 225 participants was gathered. The results indicate that respondents, on average, perceive their corporations as socially responsible and present positive levels of Organisational Identification and Work Engagement. CSR towards governments is the CSR dimension with the highest mean, while CSR towards employees was the one with the lowest mean. It is also noteworthy that male participants and participants from private organisations have significantly higher means in these two dimensions of CSR than female participants and participants working in public organisations. Additionally, participants with managerial roles have significantly higher means for CSR towards employees than participants who do not have managerial roles. Using the Structural Equation Modeling, the hypotheses outlined were analysed. The results show that CSR towards employees is the only dimension positively impacting both Organisational Identification and Work Engagement. Remarkably, the dimension of CSR which has the lowest mean in the sample is the only one which impacts participants’ Organisational Identification and Work Engagement. Additionally, Organisational Identification mediates the relationship between CSR towards employees and Work Engagement. Moreover, this analysis concluded that CSR explains 15,7% of Organisational Identification variance, while CSR and Organisational Identification combined explain 41,1% of Work Engagement variance.