Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/286951 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Business Ethics [ISSN:] 1573-0697 [Volume:] 178 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] Springer Netherlands [Place:] Dordrecht [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 105-127
Publisher: 
Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht
Abstract: 
Companies increasingly recognize the importance of communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) including their engagement toward employees, the community, the environment and other stakeholder groups to attract applicants. The positive findings on the effect of CSR on applicants' reactions are commonly based on the assumption that companies send a clear signal about their commitment to CSR. However, communication is always contextualized and has become more ambiguous through the increased availability of information online. External stakeholders including actual and potential applicants are confronted with inconsistencies between the way companies communicate CSR activities and their overall CSR performance. Drawing on signaling theory, this article raises the question of how the interaction between strong CSR communication and low CSR performance influences organizational attractiveness. We propose that low CSR performance dampens the effect of CSR communication on organizational attractiveness. Hence, the inconsistency between CSR communication and CSR performance decreases organizational attractiveness. To test our hypotheses, we scraped 67,189 posts published on corporate Facebook career pages by 58 Fortune 500 companies from the time they began their respective career page until June 2018. Surprisingly, our results show that a low CSR performance strengthens the effect of CSR communication on organizational attractiveness. Thus, inconsistencies between CSR communication and CSR performance seem to lead to positive evaluations among applicants.
Subjects: 
Corporate social responsibility
Potential applicants
Organizational attractiveness
Corporate social responsibility performance
Signaling theory
Inconsistency
Social media
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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