The impact of corporate social responsibility on employee outcomes in the hospitality industry: A multi-motive and cross-cultural meta-analysis

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the hospitality industry has received increased attention from both practitioners and researchers in the past two decades, due in part to growing concerns regarding hospitality operations' impact on the environmental, social, and economic well-being of their communities. While research has enhanced our understanding of CSR's influence on hospitality employees, an integrated literature synthesis is still needed. Leveraging the multi-motive CSR framework, we aim to (1) synthesize CSR's impact on hospitality employee outcomes (i.e., performance, job satisfaction, and organizational identification); (2) investigate how the instrumental, relational, and moral motives of employees mediate the CSR–employee performance relationship; and (3) test how country-level factors moderate the relationship between CSR employee outcomes. Meta-analytic results using 87 studies, 33,567 individuals, and 160 effect sizes show a positive relationship between CSR and employee outcomes. Further exploring the multi-motive framework, meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) results show that instrumental, relational, and moral motives fully mediated the CSR–employee performance relationship. Additionally, results of subgroup tests indicate that the CSR–employee outcome relationship was stronger for employees working in highly developed countries and horizontal-individualistic cultures. Our findings highlight how CSR enhances employee performance through underlying psychological mechanisms, with implications for theory and practice.