Leadership in the Context of Corporate and Employee Social Responsibility in a Czech Company

Abstract

Nowadays CSR research concentrates mainly on the macro-level analysis of the phenomena connected to CSR. However, differences exist among the members of stakeholder groups concerned with CSR, which can cause different results in implementing CSR strategies, it is crucial to study CSR also on the individual (micro) level. The article aims to analyse the Czech brewery's corporate and employee social responsibility in the context of leadership. Several studies reveal how important ethical leadership is because it can affect not only organizational culture, which fosters employee commitment to corporate values but also the range of CSR activities, individuals' engagement and participation. The authors of these studies stress the importance of ethical leadership, managers' encouragement, and supervisors' attitude toward the topic. The method chosen for the research is the micro-level analysis of employee perceptions, reactions, and attitudes towards the company's CSR together with their determinants. The model of psychological micro-foundations and the ESR-CSR congruence model are used. We opted for semi-structured interviews to gain in-depth and detailed inside into the thinking and perceiving of 13 administrative employees of the company. The coding and content analysis of the respondents' testimonies was conducted in the program MAXQDA. We found amongst our respondents, who represent the group of administrative employees of the Czech brewery, that the most important determinant of their CSR engagement was corporate socialization. Many of the respondents engaged in CSR activities that were related to their job. Therefore, we found room for improvement in the extra-role CSR participation of administrative employees, but also in the encouragement from the part of their supervisors. The chosen group of employees framed their CSR perceptions by trying to look at the issue from the point of view of different stakeholders. They saw the sense of doing CSR in the need for sustainability, and a positive for the company is that these employees regarded its CSR as authentic. We found mainly positive CSR reactions on the side of respondents, such as job satisfaction, organizational pride, or job pursuit intention.