The Manifestation of Internal Corporate Social Responsibility on Employee’s Behaviour in Small Medium Sized Enterprises

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gained increasing attention and popularity since the last decade. There are many CSR debates arise since then. These debates were shaped by trends and fundamental changes of the political, social, and economic spheres of life. Tracing back, the precursor to CSR was topic of charitable giving, which had been in existence since 1980s. Todate, CSR has evolved to a business concept that had been accepted widely. Business corporations are focusing on CSR due to tremendous pressures from the society. Presently, CSR approach has emerged from focusing on the shareholders to stakeholders due to the acknowledgement of the crucial roles of stakeholders in every organisation. Stakeholder management and CSR is a relational affair. Stakeholder theory involves list of critical stakeholders namely employees, suppliers, customers, media, local communities, NGOs, that could be source of new competitive advantage. This present a research agenda to look into internal CSR practices as to how it manifest among the crucial stakeholders of every organisation, i.e. the employees, on their attitudes and behaviours. As Small Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are gaining its foothold in Malaysia, they also encountered many challenges, one of these is the issue of high employee turnover that lead to substantial costs to the organisations. The findings reveal that internal CSR practices enhanced employee’s job satisfaction and also resulted in the reduction of employee’s turnover intention. It was interesting to discover that internal CSR practices enhance employee’s organisational commitment like job satisfaction, but it failed to reduce employee’s turnover intention through enhanced organisation commitment as a result of internal CSR practices. The results also show that perceived ease of movement has an impact on employee’s turnover intention.