Intention Attributions as a Mediator Between Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives and Stakeholder Perception

Abstract

There is a natural incongruence between a company’s traditional profit maximizing objectives and the social and environmental goals of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. When companies engage in CSR, they create an expectancy violation and stakeholders are driven to react to this by considering and evaluating the company’s intentions behind their CSR initiatives. Attribution theory predicts that people are driven to make judgments and respond to an action based on its underlying intentions. Attribution theory is highly relevant to stakeholder perceptions and this paper develops a model with intention attributions as a mediating variable between CSR initiatives and stakeholder perceptions.