Walk the Talk or I Will Get Emotional and Leave: CSR Managers Response to Perceptions of Decoupling

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers are middle managers, tasked with the integration and implementation of CSR and sustainability strategies into their organizations’ daily operations. In this role, they may frequently be confronted with decoupling between CSR and sustainability policies and practices but little is known on how these managers react to such corporate greenwashing. We draw on the literature on decoupling and on CSR managers to develop a mixed-methods research design that consists of a qualitative analysis of French CSR managers’ experiences and an experiment testing CSR managers’ responses. We unveil how perceptions of decoupling affect their emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. Our results indicate three sources of decoupling: top-down decoupling (generated by top management practices); lateral decoupling (coming from peers); and bottom-up decoupling (coming from external stakeholders, especially customers), which in turn lead to different affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses by CSR managers. Our study enriches prior intraorganizational studies on decoupling, explaining how CSR managers respond to, and try to overcome, decoupling and expands the micro-perspective on CSR by bridging the intra-individual level (how CSR managers perceive CSR decoupling) and the inter-individual level of analysis (how they participate in social practices that prevent or foster CSR decoupling).