Corporate social responsibility and employee innovative behaviors: A meta-analysis

As innovation is crucial to an organization's survival and can contribute to sustainability and cleaner production, researchers have recently paid closer attention to employees' creativity and innovative behaviors in the context of corporate social responsibility strategies. This manuscript provides a quantitative synthesis on the relation between corporate social responsibility and employees' innovative behaviors, as well as a descriptive overview of explaining mechanisms. For this purpose, a meta-analysis of primary studies on corporate social responsibility and employees' innovative behavior was conducted, using the methods of Schmidt and Hunter. In total, k = 26 studies (N = 7970) were statistically synthesized. The average effect size was large (ρ = 0.45). Moderators were investigated in subsample analyses (internal vs. external corporate social responsibility as well as human development and corporate size) and meta-regressions (gender and culture). The effect size was larger for internal than for external corporate social responsibility. Human development of the organization's country of operation seems to have an impact on the relation between corporate social responsibility and innovative behaviors. Moreover, the effect was stronger in smaller than in bigger organizations. Practical implications are relevant for upper management, sustainability departments in organizations, and human resource management: The potential of corporate social responsibility for innovation in organizations is discussed. We stress the importance of corporate social responsibility as an organization-level determinant of employee innovative behavior for cleaner production.