Why Are Corporations Willing to Take on Public CSR? An Organizational Traits Approach

Corporation social responsibility includes the relational responsibility for the contractual stakeholders (relational CSR) and the public responsibility for the whole society (public CSR). In this paper, we examined the effect of organizational virtuousness on a corporation's public CSR behavior and the moderating effect of organizational identity orientation between them. To test our hypothesis, we collected and analyzed a sample from 88 corporations and 742 respondents through questionnaires. Our results show that organizational virtuousness is positively associated with a corporation's public CSR behavior, and this positive effect is moderated by organizational identity orientation. Among them, individualistic and collectivistic identity orientation positively moderates the relationship between organizational virtuousness and public CSR, while relational identity orientation negatively moderates the relationship between them. Our results suggest that a virtuous corporation does not necessarily have more willingness to take on public CSR than its counterparts, because the intention also depends on the type of identity orientation possessed by the virtuous corporation. In order to improve the enthusiasm of enterprises to take on public CSR, in addition to cultivating the virtue of organizations, different management measures should be taken according to the identity orientation of organizations.