Frontline Employees as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Ambassadors: A Quasi-Field Experiment

As past research has identified frontline employees as the primary communicators of a company’s CSR, this paper reports on a large-scale quasi-field experiment aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the levers of successful in-store, point-of-sale, CSR communication. In cooperation with a large...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Edinger-Schons, Laura Marie (Author) ; Lengler-Graiff, Lars (Author) ; Scheidler, Sabrina (Author) ; Wieseke, Jan (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2019
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2019, Volume: 157, Issue: 2, Pages: 359-373
Further subjects:B Boundary-spanning agents
B CSR communication
B Managers’ personal support
B Frontline employees
B CSR ambassadors
B In-store communication
B Corporate social responsibility (CSR)
B Point-of-sale communication
B CSR-related training of employees
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:As past research has identified frontline employees as the primary communicators of a company’s CSR, this paper reports on a large-scale quasi-field experiment aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the levers of successful in-store, point-of-sale, CSR communication. In cooperation with a large international retailer, the authors analyzed the effects of varying in-store CSR communication strategies in 48 unique stores, combining data from a customer survey (N = 38,999), company records of customers’ real visits and purchases, and interviews with store managers. Taking into account the nested structure of the data, the authors reveal that CSR-related training of frontline employees bestows its favorable effect on customers and customer behavior only if it is accompanied by the store managers’ personal support for CSR.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3790-9