Frontline Employees as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Ambassadors: A Quasi-Field Experiment

Laura Marie Edinger-Schons, Lars Lengler-Graiff, Sabrina Scheidler, Jan Wieseke

Journal of Business Ethics · 2019 · Volume 157 · Issue 2

Abstract

As past research has identified frontline employees as the primary communicators of a company’s CSR, this paper reports on a large-scale quasi-field experiment aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the levers of successful in-store, point-of-sale, CSR communication. In cooperation with a large international retailer, the authors analyzed the effects of varying in-store CSR communication strategies in 48 unique stores, combining data from a customer survey (N= 38,999), company records of customers’ real visits and purchases, and interviews with store managers. Taking into account the nested structure of the data, the authors reveal that CSR-related training of frontline employees bestows its favorable effect on customers and customer behavior only if it is accompanied by the store managers’ personal support for CSR.

Keywords

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), CSR communication, In-store communication, Point-of-sale communication, Boundary-spanning agents, Frontline employees, CSR ambassadors, CSR-related training of employees, Managers’ personal support

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