Date of Award
Fall 2022
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Psychology, PhD
Program
School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Becky Reichard
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Michelle Bligh
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Stephen Gilliland
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Deborah Rupp
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2022 Shin Han
Keywords
Conjoint Analysis, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Dilemma
Subject Categories
Business Administration, Management, and Operations | Psychology
Abstract
There has been a surging interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in society, and business leaders perceive that CSR is essential in business operations. However, CSR can lead to unsatisfactory outcomes when not appropriately understood or practiced. Therefore, I conducted two studies to provide an alternative CSR perspective (Study 1) and empirically test how firms can benefit the most from CSR in applicant attraction (Study 2). In Study 1, I analyzed CSR as an organizational social dilemma (Rockmann & Northcraft, 2018), where the conflicts among stakeholders and between short- and long-term outcomes are inevitable. To minimize these conflicts, firms need to aim at long-term value maximization (Jensen, 2002) to provide the maximum outcome to the firm and satisfy all relevant stakeholders. Adopting these perspectives, I introduced Enlightened Shared Value (ESV) and compared ESV with major CSR approaches. ESV provides a clear metric and the method for CSR, which is lacking in existing CSR approaches. I suggest that shifting focus to long-term outcomes can reduce the conflicts in CSR and make CSR a win-win game. In Study 2 ( N = 425), I investigated how CSR affects applicant attraction in job choice situations. Previous research has shown that CSR positively affects applicant attraction in job choice situations, but less is known about the relative importance of each CSR dimension in applicant attraction. Categorizing CSR into four dimensions (employee, environmental, social, and governance) and applying adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis (ACBC: Orme, 2020), I examined how each CSR dimension and important tangible attributes differently affect applicant attraction in job choice situations and how personal values influence the relationship. Additionally, I conducted an exploratory cluster analysis to segment individuals based on the pattern of their preference among job attributes in job choice situations. Results from ACBC showed that the employee dimension had the largest influence on applicant attraction among the CSR dimensions, followed by the environmental dimension. However, CSR dimensions’ influence on applicant attraction was mostly weaker than that of tangible attributes, especially salary. As a personal value measure, social value orientation (Murphy et al., 2011) positively influenced CSR’s influence on applicant attraction. Also, the exploratory cluster analysis revealed three different groups: CSR-oriented (23.3%), Individualistic (26.4%), and Pragmatic (50.4%). Taken together, findings from both studies contribute to theory and practice. First, understanding CSR as a social dilemma not just provides a new CSR perspective. It also helps practitioners by suggesting that ESV can lead to corporate value maximization in the long term. Second, CSR dimensions and their differing influences on applicant attraction, which I found in Study 2, suggest that CSR needs to be understood as multi-faceted. Still, more discussion is needed for CSR categorization. Third, findings from the conjoint and cluster analyses suggest that when firms use CSR to attract applicants, they need to understand that CSR influences applicants differently. Therefore, it is important to set target applicant groups and emphasize relevant CSR dimensions to attract them.
ISBN
9798368465494
Recommended Citation
Han, Shin. (2022). Attracting Applicants with Corporate Social Responsibility: A Social Dilemma Perspective. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 439. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/439.
