Corporate social responsibility and individual resistance: Learning as the missing link in implementation

Abstract

This article uses organisational learning literature to explore how employees’ orientations to corporate social responsibility, mental models and assessments of organisations’ espoused and enacted values, impact upon the success of corporate social responsibility programmes and actions. Work by Aguilera et al. (2007) is used to consider the potential dissonance between individual and organisational motives for corporate social responsibility. This theoretical article discusses the role of motives and learning within change. It contemplates both the role of motives held within mental models as a crucial factor in the successful adoption of effective corporate social responsibility practices and the function of learning practices in the support of corporate social responsibility change. Its contribution is in its focus at the level of the individual employee and in its challenge to assumptions about the relationship between individual and organisational motives for corporate social responsibility implementation. It is argued that effective implementation of corporate social responsibility requires organisations to consider both the role of learning and unlearning. Furthermore, organisations need to provide active support for the development of mental models about corporate social responsibility to prevent the development of dissonance between individual and organisational dispositions towards it.