Employee‐CSR Tensions: Drivers of Employee (Dis)Engagement with Contested CSR Initiatives

Firms face mounting pressure to implement organization-wide CSR initiatives inorder to address social issues such as climate change, poverty alleviation, and inequality. Suchefforts hinge on the engagement of employees throughout the organization. Yet, involving moreemployees in CSR, as well as the magnitude of organizational change required to address press-ing social issues, are likely to trigger employee-CSR (E-CSR) tensions, i.e., tensions betweenemployees’ personal preferences for organizational CSR initiatives and their perceptions of theactual organizational CSR initiatives. While prior research on micro-CSR has identified a rangeof employee engagement with CSR, it does not explain employees’ CSR (dis)engagement whenthey experience E-CSR tensions. We draw on the literature on individuals’ responses to para-doxical tensions to unpack how and why employees who experience E-CSR tensions (dis)engagedifferently with CSR initiatives. We develop a conceptual framework around the interplay ofthree drivers (type of tension, cognition, and organizational situatedness) to explain the em-ployee response to E-CSR tensions in terms of different types of (dis)engagement with CSR ini-tiatives. We contribute to the micro-CSR literature by explaining how and why employees (dis)engage differently with CSR initiatives with which they disagree, and to the microfoundationsof paradox by challenging the dominant association between both/and thinking and generativeoutcomes vs either/or thinking and detrimental outcomes.