기업사회공헌이 조직몰입에 기여하는가?

초록

Corporate social contribution (CSR) has evolved to a management strategy embodied in the overall business activities of modern management. However, it has still remained questionable whether CSR is mostly driven by management activities with relatively passive participation of employees. We conducted a survey study regarding CSR to rank-and-file employees. Survey respondents are working for three different companies belonging to pharmaceutical industry, heavy industry, construction industry. Using the survey results, we analyze the relationship between organizational commitment and CSR activities. The main interest of our study lies in the research question, whether CSR activities could enhance organizational commitment of employees. If employees turn out to get a stronger organizational commitment through participating CSR activities, then the result would imply that CSR would contribute to value creation. According to the survey results, employees keep significant level of awareness and agreement on CSR activities of their firms. This result implies that CSR has been spreading and diffusing to the entire enterprise, not just remaining in the management level. We have also confirmed that employees have considerably higher level of confidence in the value of CSR. The survey results report that employees believe that CSR activities of their firm would significantly enhance firm reputation and brand power. However, employees feel that they have somewhat little chance in involving in policy- and consensus-building process of CSR. The result also shows that employees feel no significant difference in effectiveness in leading CSR activities between management and workers’union. In analyzing the relationship between organizational commitment and CSR activities, we choose several proxy variables for organizational commitment and CSR activities. Proxy variables for organizational commitment include employees’ affection and pride in their firm, job satisfaction, and labor-manager relationship. Variables for CSR activities are categorized by three kinds: 1) variables measuring the degree of employees’ voluntary involvement in CSR activities, 2) employees’ belief in positive effect of CSR on corporate value creation. 3) less critical sentiment of employees to CSR. From the order logit regression analysis, we have found a strong between CSR and organizational commitment. Employees with more engagement on CSR activities have stronger organizational commitment, i.e. more affection, higher pride and stronger satisfaction in their firms. They also maintain closer communication between labor and management. On the other hand, employees who are critical against CSR have less affection, pride, and satisfaction in their firms. Prior studies by Gilder et al. (2005), Larson (2001), Maignan et al. (1999) claim that the direct involvement and experience in CSR activities lead to a positive job attitude and eventually to performance improvement. Our empirical study provides with supportive evidence of prior studies. The main contribution of this study is to provide empirical evidence that shows a positive correlation between CSR and organizational commitment. Since we have not, in this study, incorporated objective financial data of firms, we could not provide more direct relationship between CSR and firm value maximization. We would leave it for future research. We note a limitation of our study regarding causality between CSR and organization commitment. The result of our study cannot be directly interpreted as strong evidence that CSR determines the level of organizational commitment because the reverse relationship can still hold. That is, the results of empirical study cannot exclude the possibility that employees with more affection, higher pride and stronger satisfaction in their firms may involve more actively with CSR. Thus the results of our study would be interpreted evidence for showing the positive correlation between CSR activities and organizational commitment, rather than cause and effect relationship between them.

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