How Co-creation Increases Employee Corporate Social Responsibility and Organizational Engagement: The Moderating Role of Self-Construal

This research merges literature from organizational behavior and marketing to garner insight into how organizations can maximize the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for enhanced CSR and organizational engagement of employees. Across two field experiments, the authors demonstrate that the effectiveness of employee co-creation activities in increasing employees’ positive CSR perceptions is moderated by self-construal (i.e., whether an individual views the self as relatively independent from or interdependent with others). In particular, the positive effect of co-creation on CSR perceptions emerges only for employees with a salient interdependent self-construal (either measured as an individual difference or experimentally manipulated). Moreover, the results demonstrate that increased positive CSR perceptions then predict increased CSR engagement and organizational engagement. The research thus highlights the need to consider self-construal when trying to utilize co-creation to predict CSR engagement and organizational engagement, via CSR perceptions.