MGT512 - Literature Review: Employees' Emotions & CSR Perspectives

This literature review delves into the intricate relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employee emotions, drawing upon existing research to understand how employees perceive and respond to their organization's CSR initiatives. It examines various perspectives, including the multiple meanings of CSR, the importance of employees as stakeholders, and the role of emotions in shaping employee attitudes towards CSR. The review highlights how employees' emotional arguments, such as pride and embarrassment, influence their views on their employer's CSR efforts. It critically analyzes the literature, identifying gaps and suggesting avenues for future research in the field of management and organizational behavior. The paper uses rhetorical theory as a framework for data analysis, and identifies six categories of emotional arguments the employees used to construct views of where their employing organization’s CSR is derived from, relating positive emotions to satisfaction with the employing organization’s CSR and negative emotions to dissatisfaction.

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Pride or Embarrassment? Employees' Emotions and Corporate Social Responsibility
Onkila, Tiina
Onkila, T. (2015). Pride or Embarrassment? Employees' Emotions and Corporate
Social Responsibility. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental
Management, 22 (4), 222-236. doi:10.1002/csr.1340
2015
Final Draft

Pride or Embarrassment?
Employees’ emotions and corporate social responsibility
Abstract
This study explores how the employees of a financial firm use emotional arguments to
construct different views of their employer’s corporate social responsibility. It is
theoretically based on the recent literature regarding employee perspectives of CSR,
and especially on the role of emotions in CSR. Furthermore, the study utilizes
rhetorical theory as a framework for data analysis. A qualitative study, based on face-
to-face interviews, was conducted among 27 employees in a Finnish financial firm.
The study identifies six categories of emotional arguments the employees used to
construct views of where their employing organization’s CSR is derived from. These
categories relate positive emotions to satisfaction with the employing organization’s
CSR and negative emotions to dissatisfaction. The results show that employees also
experience external pressures for CSR, but only implicitly, because they do not wish
be embarrassed by their employer.
Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, employees, rhetoric, emotions, financing
firm
Introduction
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is usually conceptualized through different
stakeholder groups and their importance to and demands on CSR. The discussion has
recently been extended to the importance of employees—not simply as demanders of
responsibility in issues such as responsible HRM practices (Celma et al., 2012) but as
participating in or initiating, for instance, donations (Haski-Leventhal, 2012). However,
the role of employees in how CSR is perceived is under-researched and the literature

argues for more research on the employees in addressing responsibility in business
(Russell and Griffiths, 2008).
Prior research on environmental responsibilities in business has highlighted the
importance of emotions to responsibility. Russell and Griffiths (2008, p.85) stated:
While environmental management research does mention emotive components of pro-
environmental behavior (Andersson and Bateman, 2000; Bansal and Roth, 2000; Ramus
and Steger , 2000), there are very few studies that examine emotion directly.
The importance of emotions was further stressed by Fineman (1996a, p.480):
I wish to argue that pro-environmental organizational changes, like other organizational
changes, depend crucially on the emotional meanings that key actors attribute to
environmental protection.
However, one finds surprisingly little data on the emotions employees relate to CSR
and their consequences for its different meanings. As Russell and Griffiths (2008) point
out, while environmental management research has mentioned the emotive
components of pro-environmental behavior, there are few studies that examine
emotions directly. From an environmental responsibility point of view, these include
Fineman’s (1996a) and Fineman and Sturdy’s (1999) work, whereas solely from a
CSR point of view emotions remain unstudied. Still, emotions explicitly brought up by
the interviewees were a striking feature in my interviewee material concerning
corporate social responsibility and information dissemination in a financial firm.
Prior research on employee roles in CSR has especially maintained employees as a
coherent, unified group that demands CSR among other stakeholders (Jamali, 2008;
Longo et al., 2005; Royle, 2005; Preuss et al., 2009; McWilliams and Siegel, 2001).
In addition, the studies on cultural changes in regards to CSR have aimed at creating
such a coherent group by managerial action (Halme, 2002; Siebenhuner and Arnold,
2007; Haugh and Talwar, 2010; Benn and Martin, 2010; Del Brio et al., 2008). Thus
the research has focused on asking what the employee demands are on CSR among
other stakeholders and how management can motivate employees to participate in
CSR. However, a few studies have embraced the different meanings that employees
attach to CSR. For instance, Rupp et al. (2006) stressed employees’ different
judgments of their employing organization’s CSR. Still, little is known about the
employees’ judgments of how their employing organization’s CSR is defined and the
emotions related to those judgments.

This encouraged me to conduct a rhetorically oriented study on explicit emotions
expressed by employees while talking about their employing organization CSR. The
study asks how employees of a Finnish financial firm use explicitly emotional
arguments to construct different views of corporate social responsibility. The study
shows that employees use emotional arguments to construct distinct views of where
their employing organization’s CSR is derived from, relating positive emotions to
satisfaction with CSR and negative emotions to shortcomings in the employing
organization’s CSR.
I first review the previous research on CSR, emotions and employees and show its
implications for this study. Second, I present the rhetorical approach of the study as
well as the research context, material and methods. Finally, I explain the empirical
results of the study and discuss the contribution of the study.
Corporate Social Responsibility, Emotions and Employees
Multiple Meanings of CSR
The first definitions of corporate social responsibility date back to the 1950s. During
this era it held different meanings (Carroll, 1999), from Friedman’s (1970)
argumentation of profit maximization to more modern definitions encompassing
different pillars or dimensions of CSR (Carroll, 1993; Wood, 1991; Elkington, 1997).
Although Carroll’s work (1993) and Elkington’s (1997) triple bottom line are commonly
accepted as starting points for a definition of CSR, still many researchers and
practitioners contest the term’s meaning. For example, Dahlsrud (2008) found 37
definitions for CSR. He concluded that the existing definitions are, to a large degree,
congruent and refer to five dimensions: stakeholder, social, economic, voluntariness
and environmental. He explains that the confusion is not so much about how CSR is
defined, but about how CSR is socially constructed in a specific context. Although
there is some agreement on what types of issues can be included in CSR on the
macro-level, we still know little of the meanings related to CSR in different micro-
contexts by different actors. In different contexts CSR can be a contested and disputed

phenomenon (Dobers, 2009). Contextual factors influence the perceptions and
definitions of CSR. This means the current CSR concepts still suffer from a level of
abstraction to which Jamali (2008) offers the stakeholder approach as a practical
alternative. This approach, too, however, provides few tools for analyzing different
meanings of the concept.
Employees’ Importance to CSR
Despite the discussion of the different meanings of CSR, the mainstream literature
stresses employees as a unified group and the importance of shared responsibility. A
number of streams of research point out that employees, among other stakeholders,
demand CSR and note their crucial role in the internal organizational changes for
achieving CSR.
First, the stakeholder perspective places employees among key stakeholders concerning
CSR (Carroll, 1999; Jamali, 2008; Longo et al., 2005; Royle, 2005; Preuss et al., 2009;
McWilliams and Siegel, 2001). Among other stakeholders, they are pushing
organizations towards responsible behavior (Aguilera et al., 2007; Williams and Siegel,
2001). Williams and Siegel (2001) identified two major sources of demand for CSR:
consumer demand and demand from other stakeholders such as investors, employees
and the community. They especially identified the influence of unions, and interest in
labor relation policies, safety and financial security. Furthermore, Henriques and
Sadorsky (1999) identified four groups that demand firms to protect the natural
environment: regulatory stakeholders (government and trade associations),
organizational stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders),
community stakeholders (community groups and environmental organizations) and the
media. Sharma and Henriques (2005) examined how managers’ perceptions of different
types of stakeholder influences affect the types of sustainability practices that firms
adopt. A multiplicity of withholding influences (by regulators, environmental NGOs),
usage influences (by customers) and employee influences (through involvement) were
identified by managers. Preuss et al. (2009) found especially employee representatives
and trade unions as important demanders. Spence (2009) identified investors and
employees as being overwhelmingly the most important audiences targeted by social
and environmental reporting managers. Huang and Kung (2010) identified three groups

of stakeholders that greatly influence managerial choices regarding environmental
disclosure strategies: external stakeholders (government, debtors, consumers), internal
stakeholders (shareholders, employees) and intermediate stakeholders (environmental
NGOs and accounting firms). Furthermore, employee demands are not related only to
general CSR, but to environmental issues in particular. For instance Marshall et al. (2005)
found employee welfare to be an important driver for proactive environmental behavior
in the US wine industry. This approach assumes employees as a coherent and collective
group of individuals who unanimously demand responsible action from management.
Another main stream of research connects employees to internal organizational changes
to promote responsibility. This discussion has focused especially on the question of
developing a strongly integrative responsibility-oriented organizational culture (Dodge,
1997; Del Brio et al, 2008). The process of developing such a culture has mainly been
viewed through the concepts of sustainability and environmentalism as a collective
learning process (Halme, 1997; Halme, 2002; Siebenhuner and Arnold, 2007; Haugh and
Talwar, 2010; Benn and Martin, 2010; Del Brio et al., 2008) with the aim of creating a
holistic, shared understanding of responsibility in an organization. Furthermore, the
influence of managerial behavior on responsibility challenges has been identified as
being crucial in engaging employees to tackle the problems (Wolf, 2012; Ramus, 2002;
Baumgartner, 2009). The findings of Aragon-Correa et al. (2004) and Robertson and
Barling (2012) support the central role of executives in the so-called greening of an
organization. Ramus (2002) further emphasizes the importance of managerial tools
(education, participative communication and rewarding for sustainability) for such
change: supervisory behavior can positively affect employees’ environmental actions and
initiatives. Collier and Esteban (2007) focus on effective delivery of CSR practices—and
state that only the employees “whose value and vision are fully aligned with those of the
organization will handle these situations effectively” (p. 30). They conclude that it is
necessary for ethics and responsibility to become embedded in the culture of the
organization. They further point out that corporations have developed a range of CSR
practices, like such as codes of conduct, which seek to regulate the behavior of
employees. Marshall et al. (2005) follow the main stream as they stress the need for
infusing strong environmental values among employees throughout the company.
Zwetsloot (2003) highlight the importance of continuous learning related to management
system development in regards to CSR.

The above mentioned approaches to the role of employees in CSR both assume
employees as a coherent group or stakeholder that shares, or eventually comes to share,
approaches to CSR. However, some studies have highlighted the different perceptions
of CSR among employees. Both Howard-Grenville (2006) and Linnenluecke et al. (2009)
identify differences in employees’ understandings, but they explain the different
interpretations by the existence of different subcultures in organizational culture. Harris
and Crane (2002) identify confusion concerning the definitions and differences between
various concepts of organizational environmentalism among managers and cultural
greening not as a simple, one-dimensional concept. Baumgartner (2009) identified
discussions, uncertainty and tensions about sustainable development, especially about
further development regarding corporate sustainable development activities. Other
research has identified individual differences in employees’ orientation to CSR based, for
on the age of employee (Lipsett 2012). Furthermore, Ramus and Killmer (2007) point out
problems in the organizational integration of CSR: corporate greening behaviors are not
often formally required for an employee’s job and may suffer from a lack of clear goals or
certainty about organizational rewards. On the other hand, Zhu et al. (2012) and Alniacik
et al. (2011) showed the positive outcomes of CSR from the employee perspective.
Alniacik et al. found that positive CSR information enhances a potential employee’s
intentions to seek employment. Zhu et al. found worker satisfaction and commitment
persists as long as management is perceived to be making clear CSR efforts for
employees, such as enhancing the future security of their jobs.
Similar to the first main stream, which focused on employees as a stakeholder, this
second stream assumes employees as a unified group sharing views of corporate social
responsibility. However, the main difference is in the perspective that the latter one
stresses the need for change if management perceives that responsibility values are not
shared in the organization. If we perceive CSR only as top-down managed change
process, we encounter two major problems from the employee perspective: 1) the CSR
approach of the organization only relies on the managerial interpretation of the
organization, not on that of the employees who are supposed to implement it; and 2) The
employees will easily question the CSR approaches that are distant from their own work.
Studying Emotions toward CSR

Emotions in work organizations have been defined from the social perspective:
According to Rafaeli and Worline (2001), emotions are essentially social, just as
people are. Fineman and Sturdy (1999) stress that emotions need to be understood
in terms of the social structures of which they are a part. Furthermore, Weiss and
Cropanzano (1996, p. 17) state that
Emotions are intuitively well understood yet a definitive definition of emotion has been
difficult to come by…an emotional reaction is not just one reaction but a constellation of
related reactions.
Emotions have been viewed from different perspectives (see Fineman and Sturdy
1999, p. 634), and the social perspective makes a distinction between the subjective
experience of emotions (feelings) and their personal/dramatic displays (emotions)
(Fineman, 1996b; Fineman and Sturdy, 1999). Fineman (1996b, p. 289) explains:
For those who spend much of their time in organizations, emotion talk is often taken for
granted: the gripes, the anger, the anxiety, the frustrations; the glee, the joy, the tedium,
the embarrassments, the despair. These are part of social creation and personal
expression of work and organizational life.
As Rafaeli and Worline (2001) suggest, emotions emerge within social collectives, so
work organizations are filled with emotions. Fineman (1996b) goes further, stating that
work activities are shaped by emotions.
Prior research on environmental responsibility has identified the emotional subtexts of
corporate greening (Fineman, 1996a), emotions related to environmental control
(Fineman and Sturdy, 1999) and the dangers of using dramatic and emotional
language in representing environmental issues in business (Andersson and Bateman,
2000). Fineman (1996a) identified four emotionally significant subtexts for corporate
greening: enacting green commitment, contesting green boundaries, defending
autonomy and avoiding embarrassment. These emotional subtexts were related to the
way green pressures were received and culturally incorporated or rejected by senior
managers in six UK supermarkets. It is especially noteworthy that managers do not
relate negative emotions only to rejecting green pressures and defending autonomy.
Many managers were keenly aware that they could be embarrassed by criticism of
their environmental record. Fineman and Sturdy (1999) continued research on
emotions in relation to environmental issues, as they identified emotions of control
among environmental regulatory inspectors and industrial managers in the UK.
Andersson and Bateman (2000) noted in their study that the use of dramatic and

emotional language in presenting environmental issues to gain top-management
support was not a significant predictor in the outcome of any championing episodes.
Rather the use of drama and emotion may have had a negative impact on the success
of championing episodes. Besides the environmental dimension, one can find
surprisingly little evidence on the emotions employees connect with CSR
Negative and positive affectivity are the main components of emotions (Weiss and
Cropanzano, 1996; Russell and Griffiths, 2008). Emotions can be represented in terms
of these two distinct dimensions. (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). As Fineman (1996a)
shows, both positive and negative emotions play a role in the adaptation of pro-
environmental behaviors within organizations. Managers spoke of positive emotions
in relation to commitment to environmental issues (such as belonging, respect, awe
and loyalty) but also negative emotions played a role, especially fear and
embarrassment. Thus there is evidence that both positive and negative emotions can
result in pro-environmental behavior.
In prior research, Rupp et al. (2006) stress the importance of employees’ emotions to
CSR. According to them, employees’ perceptions of CSR trigger emotional, attitudinal,
and behavioral responses. They form a theoretical proposition on employees’
perceptions CSR which states (p. 540):
Employee perceptions of CSR will exert positive effects on individually relevant
outcomes such as organizational attractiveness, job satisfaction, organizational
commitment, citizenship behavior, and job performance. Employee perceptions of CSR
will exert negative effects on individually-relevant outcomes such as anger.
Similar to the proposition of Rupp et al. (2006), Carrus et al. (2008) show that negative
anticipated emotions and past behavior are significant predictors of desire to engage
in pro-environmental action.
Rhetorical Approach
This study describes how the types of corporate social responsibility are rhetorically
constructed in the interviews with employees, following the assumption that language
has the power to contribute to our understanding of the formation of views of certain
corporations’ CSR (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). This study joins the school of new

rhetoric born under the influence of the linguistic turn in the 1960s (Billig, 1987;
Perelman, 1982; Potter, 1996) and makes no distinction between rhetoric and reality.
Here, rhetoric is a part of socially constructed reality. New rhetoric is based on the
assumption that it is possible and necessary to classify how credibility emerges for
certain claims and on what basis commitment to different conclusions occurs. Unlike
studies of realism, constructionist studies do not aim to reveal social reality, but focus
on how people construct versions of social reality in social interaction (Burr, 1995).
Billig (1987) points out that rhetoric should be seen as a pervasive feature of the way
people interact and arrive at understanding. Rhetorical argumentation is an essential
quality of all language use and a persuasive feature in social interaction, when people
aim to accomplish a common understanding.
The rhetorical approach does not offer an unambiguous, clear research method. It can
be understood as a loose theoretical framework that allows opportunities to use and
develop different methods for analyzing texts. My loose framework for analysis was
guided by the following rhetorical principles:
• Openness: Billig (1987) describes openness as a possibility to present different
arguments that, while they may be conflicting, all of them are arguable. Finding
just a single correct solution, as required by logic, is impossible. By applying
the rhetorical approach, I am interested in the possibility of finding alternative
views that Billig (1987) describes as especially characteristic of political, ethical
and juridical questions. My interest is in finding competing realities in the texts
I have analyzed.
• Emotionality: Gilbert (1995) stresses that scholars have recognized that some
arguments are emotional, and some very emotional. They are very context-
related and occur because there are times when the expression of such feeling
is important for us. Furthermore, early on Aristotle (see Summa, 1996; Palonen
and Summa, 1996) represented three levels of the means for persuasion:
ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos is related to how the speaker presents himself
to the audience. Pathos deals with the means that are used for preparing the
audience to listen to the speaker, and also thus deals with the interaction in the
argumentation and discussion process. Pathos refers to means that are used
to decrease any obstacles to communication. That type of persuasion deals
with the emotional aspects in argumentation. Logos deals with the logical

structures of different types of arguments for a certain claim and thus with the
abstract content of the claim. (Summa, 1996; Palonen and Summa, 1996).
• Associations and dissociations: Perelman’s (1982) theory of argumentation is
one of the foundations of the school of new rhetoric. In it the basic idea is to
create a dissociation and association (liaisons) between two or more issues.
Using liaisons means associative argumentation, creating connections
between different phenomena. If arguments are given as dissociation, they aim
at separating elements which language or a recognized tradition has previously
tied together and thus it structures information in a new way. In dissociation,
different sides are separated in the phenomena and they are proportioned to
each other or some other phenomena (Perelman, 1982).
Material and Methods
Research context and material
Prior research on financial firms' CSR has focused on critical approaches to CSR
reporting (Coupland, 2006; Douglas et al., 2004). The financial firm in this study has a
clear goal to be a CSR pioneer in the Finnish financial industry. It clearly states this
goal on its website. It publishes a responsibility report, participates in multiple CSR
projects and some of its employees, including the CEO, are active members in Finnish
CSR networks. Furthermore, because the firm is a cooperative owned by its customers,
it must meet special requirements of transparency and responsibility. Both the goal to
be a CSR pioneer in a less studied business branch and the ownership of the firm offer
an especially interesting research setting for this study. The organization employs
about 3,000 people. The operations cover banking, financing and insurance services.
Recently the corporation has faced a challenge: they downsized 150 employees. From
this organization 27 people were interviewed (39–95 min/each) and people from all
levels of the organizational hierarchy participated.
A qualitative and interpretative approach (Kovalainen and Eriksson, 2008) was applied
in this study because the aim was to understand the richness and complexity of

interactions and processes in social contexts. All the interviews focused on the
meaning of CSR in the interviewees’ daily work. All the interviews covered the same
four themes: job description of the interviewee, views on CSR in the corporation,
internal CSR communication, external CSR communication. All the topics were openly
discussed from the viewpoint of the employees’ daily job. The questions had an open-
ended structure, for example: Could tell me about your normal work day? How do you
relate to CSR in your corporation? How are you informed about CSR?
Analysis
I analyzed the interviews as argumentative texts in which versions of the employing
organization’s corporate social responsibility are being constructed, looking especially
at the types of emotional arguments used. I read through the interviews several times
and noticed that emotions repeatedly emerged when talking about the employing
organization’s CSR. I then used Atlas.ti for coding all the parts of the interviews in
which emotional arguments were explicitly used by the interviewees and reduced the
data. I then excluded those parts that did not deal with my research interest. I followed
the principles of rhetorical analysis (explained above) to analyze each extract with
explicit emotions and listed the emotion, its positive or negative meaning and what the
CSR is associated/dissociated with. For representation of the positive and negative
meaning, certain contrasts were identified. The interviewees used, for example,
certain positively laden emotions in the negative sense (e.g., “disappointment because
the firm lacks courage”) and vice versa. An example of the coding and analysis
process is represented in Table 1.
------------------------------ INSERT TABLE1 ABOUT HERE----------------------------------
At this point in the analysis I noticed that emotional arguments were used to construct
different meanings for the employing organization’s CSR. I then continued by
analyzing the similarities and differences and arrived at two negative and four positive
ways of using emotional arguments to produce meanings of the employing
organization’s CSR. In all of them the interviewees produced a view of where their