Employing the Theory of Planned Behavior to Understand the Intention of Employees Engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Activities

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background.

The most critical strategic stakeholders of the organizations are their employees (Kim & Rhee, 2011). Many organizations are turning their attention to employee engagement in recent years. The term of engagement is more likely to become one of the most popular among human resource, organizational behavior, psychology, management, and academic literature. Employee engagement seems to be one of critical drivers of organizational success (Lockwood, 2007). Furthermore, the consequences of employee engagement displayed the positive relationship towards employee turnover intention, employee productivity, organizational performance, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

According to the State of the Global Workplace report 2017, the number of employees that not engaged or disengaged in their work is 85%. It is approximately cost $7 trillion of productivity of economic consequences from the disengagement behavior. Sixty-seven percent are considered as not engage in the organization activities, while 18% are categorized as the active work disengagement. The disengagement and low level of engagement at work will decrease the employee commitment, employee satisfaction, and employee productivity and, in the same time, increase the negative-related action, and turnover rate (Allam, 2017). In order to create the high level of performance culture, the high engagement level of employees is a key. From Gallup’s Global Employee Engagement Database, the companies that in the top quartile of the list had potentially generated 21% of profitability and 17% of productivity more than the companies in the lowest quartile. There are likely several reasons for the low level of engagement among employee population around the world, however, the pace of social and changing in technology is also the major theme. Specifically, organizations and firms have been faced the difficulty of adapting the transformative information technology towards the global markets labors and products, and the millennial workforces’ expectation.

Several studies examined the background of employee engagement from the different fields of study, for example, organizational justice, rewards and recognition, job characteristics, perceived organizational and supervisor support (Karatepe, 2012). The challenges of the organizations today are not only to retain talented employees and increase organizational commitment but also increase the level of the employee engagement to maintain their performance and satisfaction (Kaye & Jordan-Evans, 2003). Employee engagement is a very important tool for the companies which focus on employee motivation, commitment, job satisfaction, and involvement (Stairs, 2005).

Organizations always want their employees to work efficiently and also engage in the extra role behavior while employees would like to work that is meaningful and challenging. Money is not the only thing that impacts the employee engagement but also the relationship and recognition that motivate the emotion and intention to engage in the certain behavior. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the influential approaches for increasing employee engagement (Glavas, 2016). The CSR activities towards community, society, and environment generate positive outcomes for employee engagement which will create the work meaningfulness among the employees.

Corporate social responsibility has generally become popular among professionals, researchers as well as the media and academic papers during the past few decades. CSR will benefit the company competitive advantage (Branco & Rodrigues, 2006; McWilliams, Siegel, & Wright, 2006) including financial performance (Orlitzky, 2005; Porter & Kramer, 1999, 2002) talent attraction and motivation (Rodrigo & Arenas, 2008), and company reputation (Fombrun & Gardberg, 2000). According to YourCause data 2017, there are 17% of overall voluntary involvement rate and the employee productivity increase 13% from engaging in CSR activities. The significant relationship between employee engagement and CSR activities was emphasized by (Collier & Esteban, 2007) which is “employees carry the main burden of responsibility for implementing ethical corporate behavior [such as CSR activities] and the achievement of those outcomes will largely depend on employee willingness to collaborate”. The employee who experienced in CSR activities will greatly increase the individual attitude of the company, community, and society (Rodrigo & Arenas, 2008). For those who engage in CSR activities, they will recognize the social benefit in term of individual engagement and the organization economic and social benefits. Willing to be a good company citizenship is the consequence of engaging the CSR activities (Caldwell, Harris, & Renko, 2012; Deckop, Cirka, & Andersson, 2003).

Company policies and social activities have been showed from the perspective of the organizations. Collier and Esteban (2007) revealed that the effect of employee responsiveness on engaging CSR activities was depended on how the company communicated in CSR programs. Also, the lack of communication of the CSR value in term of individual and organization throughout the employees (Arvidsson, 2010; Duarte, 2010) may affect a share value between individual and organization towards CSR. The clear and attractive communication need to be activated in order to gain more attention and understanding on the importance of engaging in firm’s CSR activities (Chong, 2009). Slack, Corlett, and Morris (2015) mentioned that the ineffective internal communication led to the low rate of engagement. The perceived information quality (PIQ) of the communication is a very important part of the organization for improve CSR engagement and also initiate the CSR culture among the employees (Miles, Munilla, & Darroch, 2006). Effective communication which provided by the professional relations can create trust and commitment among employees which will lead to employee engagement (Mishra, Boynton, & Mishra, 2014).

1.2 Research Motivation.

The current study would like to understand the factors that may impact and activate the engagement in CSR activities intention since the level of engagement and CSR become the main focus of global organizations. However, most of the studies of employee engagement and CSR was conducted in Western and developed countries with some empirical outcomes from the developing country especially Thailand.

Since I had been working in CSR Management section for Thai Oil Public Company Limited, Thailand, for 7 years, I witnessed the increase of attention on the importance of CSR activities among Thai companies. In order to be a success in implementing CSR activities, most of the companies are trying to enhance their level of employee engagement, especially in CSR activities. This study will be conducted in Thailand due to the significant interest on employee engagement and CSR among listed organizations in the Stock Exchange Thailand (SET) and the major change in many approaches of business and society (Koonmee, Singhapakdi, Virakul, & Lee, 2010).

The research will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners who are looking for the better understanding the intention and behavior of employee engagement in CSR activities. Therefore, in order to fill the gap, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) will be applied to this research to study the relationship between the variables and also extend the theory through integrating and widening the perceived information quality of employees towards their intention and behavior. The data will be collected by using surveys, then the finding will be analyzed by using the statistic tools, finally, the researcher will test the new construct that might influence the engagement intention.

1.3 Research Objective.

• The first objective, to review what are the impact factors impact on the intention and behavior of employee engagement in CSR activities.
• The second objective, to adopt major concepts from the theory of planned behavior this study will test the relationship of attitude toward CSR activities, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, intention to engage in CSR activities and the engagement of CSR activities.
• The third objective, to extend the theory of planned behavior through integrating and broadening the perceived CSR information quality of employees towards their intention and behavior.

1.4 Research Gap.

Based on several prior studies, employee engagement can be the key consequences of a broad selection of financial, human resource, and marketing. Most of the studies were focusing on organizational context while some studies scope in the individual. Moreover, there are limited studies on the intention of employee engagement in CSR activities, especially in Thailand.

To strengthen the CSR engagement towards the employees, the high quality of communication must be supported within the organization (Collier & Esteban, 2007). From (Slack et al., 2015) studied, the employees will perceive different perspectives towards CSR activities and engagement levels through the communication. Furthermore, the empirical study on the relationship between communication and employee engagement is limited (Karanges, Johnston, Beatson, & Lings, 2015).

The researcher would like to test the framework proposed by the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) in this current study and propose the perceived CSR information quality to expand the theory to see how it influences on employee intention to engage in CSR activities.

1.5 Research Procedure.

This present study targets to discover the employee engagement in CSR activities and the impact of perceived information quality on employee intention. This study will start with the literature review and hypotheses development. The conceptual framework will be developed based on the literature review. Data collection and questionnaire will be issued in order to derive the study hypothesis. For the conclusions and limitations, those will be conclude based on the results of the data analysis.

Figure 1-1. Research Procedure