Employee Trust and Internal Motivation: Its Mediating Role Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Satisfaction With the Job Itself

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has transformed the business approach, prioritizing value over economic benefits. It has become a key factor for success in business management and corporate communication. Its disclosure strengthens relationships with external and internal stakeholders, driven by cultural changes, technologies, and immediate access to information. This research aims to analyze the relationships between the different dimensions of CSR (economic, social and environmental) and other variables that characterize employees' attitudes to their work: trust, internal motivation, and satisfaction with one's job. It focuses on direct and indirect relationships and proposes a Structural Equation Model that was analyzed with the variance-based Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique (PLS-SEM), which was carried out with a sample of 144 questionnaires completed by employees of companies in Ecuador. The results show that the economic and social dimensions of CSR strengthen employees' trust and satisfaction in their own work, while the environmental dimension of CSR has a negative and insignificant effect on workers' trust. Furthermore, only the economic dimension of CSR improves internal motivation, and both trust and intrinsic motivation influence employees' satisfaction in their own job. Although not all the proposed hypotheses are confirmed, the present study contributes original findings on the relationship between the dimensions of CSR and its impact on the motivation, trust, and satisfaction of employees in their own work in the Ecuadorian context.