Decoupling from Moral Responsibility for CSR: Employees' Visionary Procrastination at a SME
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Decoupling from Moral Responsibility for CSR: Employees’ Visionary Procrastination at a SME Tina Sendlhofer1 Received: 8 February 2018 / Accepted: 2 May 2019 © The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Most studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have focused on the organisational level, while the individual level of analysis has been treated as a ‘black box’ when researching antecedents of CSR engagement or disengagement. This article offers insights into a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) that is recognised as a pioneer in CSR. Although the extant literature suggests that the owner-manager is crucial in the implementation of CSR, this study reveals that employees drive CSR. The employees in the focal firm voluntarily joined forces based on their shared perception of moral responsibility for CSR and they developed strict targets to be achieved by 2030. Despite their strong ethical and moral perspective when enacting CSR, they disengaged from their moral responsibility for CSR in various contexts. This paper contributes to the theory of moral decoupling by uncovering a novel context of disengagement—‘visionary procrastination’. Visionary procrastination is suggested to be a particularly relevant context of disengagement when individuals perceive moral responsibility for CSR. Moreover, by delivering insights into the antecedents of employee-initiated CSR on the organisational level, this study adds to the growing body of literature on the micro-foundations of CSR. Keywords Moral responsibility for CSR · Moral decoupling · Small and medium-sized enterprises
Introduction Many empirical studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) share a common focus—the quantitative scrutiny of CSR in multinational corporations (MNCs)—even though they adopt a wide variety of theories (Aguinis and Glavas 2012; Lockett et al. 2006; Wickert and De Bakker 2018). The focus on MNCs may be rooted in the fact that CSR is often assumed to emerge from external pressures, such as exposure to stakeholder demands (e.g. Bice 2017). Although studies of MNCs as global actors in the global economy are relevant, studies of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) merit equal attention (Spence 2016). As more than 99%1 of companies in the European Union are SMEs (EC 2017) and as SMEs account for 70% of industrial pollution (Hillary 2004), SMEs constitute a crucial gateway to positive social and environmental impacts. While the majority * Tina Sendlhofer [email protected] 1
Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (Misum), Stockholm School of Economics, Holländargatan 32, 113 59 Stockholm, Sweden
of SMEs are said to demonstrate little engagement in CSR, some authors find that smaller firms are not necessarily lagging behind in the organising of it (Baumann-Pauly et al. 2013; Spence 2016). Smaller companies typically have more informal organisational characteristics, such as weak structures of control, few hierarchical levels, limited access to resources, and many of the positions in these organisations are oft
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