Mechanisms of Corporate Social Responsibility: The Moderating Role of Transformational Leadership

Literature reviews have repeatedly emphasized the need to further investigate relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and micro-organizational variables. The present research attempts to address this call by examining the direct and indirect relationship between individual perceptions of CSR and employees' organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Multiphasic data from 207 workplace supervisor-subordinate dyads recruited from an online panel were analyzed to show that organizational identification mediated the relationship between CSR and OCBs. Furthermore, supervisor transformational leadership style moderated the mediation, such that the indirect effect of the organizational identification on the relationship between CSR and OCBs became nonsignificant under low transformational leadership. Based on these results, we make suggestions for using embeddedness programs to improve perceptions of CSR.