Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility on Identification and Involvement of Hotels` Employees; Moderating Role of Organizational Support

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) includes the activities that a business conducts to affect society and/or the environment positively. Some scholars have pointed out the need for additional research regarding the additional potential positive social-based outcomes of CSR in the hospitality industry. Furthermore, management scholars argue that the interaction between the individual and organizational identification is iterative, whereas the individual's identity becomes intertwined with that of the organization. Also, the successful operation of a company is highly dependent on the attitudes and behavior of its staff. An important staff attitude for the success of a business is job involvement, which refers to the psychological bonds or personal identification that employees perceive regarding their jobs. Job involvement is considered one of the key factors affecting the quality of both individual and organizational outcomes. On the other hand, perceived organizational support refers to the employees’ overall beliefs about whether their organizations are ready to reward them for enhanced performance and care for their socio-emotional needs. Perceived organizational support also acts as an assurance that the organization will provide aid when needed. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of corporate social efforts on identification and involvement of hotels’ employees with the moderating role of organizational suppor.

This research was a descriptive and applied survey that all of the 5 star hotels of Tehran consisted of its statistical population, and 384 employees were selected for the research sample according to convenient sampling. Research data were collected using questionnaires: Park and Levy (2014)’s corporate social responsibility questionnaire, Meal and Tetrick (1992)’s identification questionnaire, Kanungo (1982)’s job involvement questionnaire, and Eisenberger et al. (1986)’s perceived organizational support questionnaire, and were analyzed according to structural equation modeling.

Findings show the positive effect of corporate social responsibility efforts on the identification and involvement of hotel employees. Also, data analysis confirmed that perceived organizational support positively moderates the relationship between corporate social responsibility and employees` identification and job involvement. Also, descriptive analysis of the main variables of the research, i.e., corporate social responsibility, job involvement, identification, and perceived organizational support, shows that the mentioned variables were at a higher level in the organizations studied in the present study average.

It can be said that corporate social responsibility efforts have considerable effects on the main work attitudes of hotels’ employees, especially on their identification and involvement. In addition, with the increasing of perceived organizational support, these effects can be increased as well. Future researchers are encouraged to study the consequences and effects of corporate social responsibility in other organizations active in the tourism industry. At the same time, by considering the role of demographic variables, more accurate classification of the impact of organizational social responsibility on the attitudes of hotel employees can be achieved. On the other hand, in addition to employee identification and job involvement, the effects of organizational social responsibility on different work attitudes such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction can be studied. In addition, there are other variables such as support of supervisors and colleagues, organizational trust, and group dynamics that can moderate the impact of organizational social responsibility on work attitudes in addition to perceiving organizational support.