RT Article
T1 Frontline Employees as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Ambassadors: A Quasi-Field Experiment
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 157
IS 2
SP 359
OP 373
A1 Edinger-Schons, Laura Marie
A1 Lengler-Graiff, Lars
A1 Scheidler, Sabrina
A1 Wieseke, Jan
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2019
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785669397
AB 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.
K1 Managers’ personal support
K1 CSR-related training of employees
K1 CSR ambassadors
K1 Frontline employees
K1 Boundary-spanning agents
K1 Point-of-sale communication
K1 In-store communication
K1 CSR communication
K1 Corporate social responsibility (CSR)
DO 10.1007/s10551-018-3790-9