Abstract

This chapter focuses on potential employee responses to organizational activities linked to socially responsible and sustainable behavior as well as employer investment in sports sponsorship. The chapter takes an overarching framework of considering corporate social responsibility (CSR) from a stakeholder perspective, as it is important to recognize that CSR programs will usually be multifaceted and involve a complex set of activities that will have implications for multiple stakeholders (Wang, Tong, Takeuchi, and George, 2016). Historically, although many researchers have explored the potential impact of CSR programs from an external point of view when looking at the potential impact of CSR investment (thus considering CSR from a macro perspective; Aguinus & Glavas, 2012), in recent years a growing body of literature and research has explored the impact of CSR investment on employees. In reviewing this research, the idea that employees may respond in different ways to their employer acting with social responsibility toward different stakeholders enables us to speculate on processes that may explain varied responses to particular types of CSR activities. In doing this we can begin to understand the complexities of potential employee responses to CSR, which enables us to theorize expected employee responses to variations in sports sponsorship campaigns.