The impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance is an important issue that puts in attention towards aspects on an individual level, like the relation between CSR and work satisfaction or work engagement. CSR activities, within an organization, shape organizational outcomes by affecting employees’ motivation. Findings indicate that CSR activities both on a firm and on a supra-organizational level have a positive impact on intrinsic motivation of employees. Therefore, the commitment to CSR can be applied as an effective instrument to induce intrinsic motivation without compromising extrinsic motivation.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reveals to be a sensitive topic for organizations, as CSR has “drastically transformed corporate entities in the way they conduct their business practices and function in the social environment where they operate” (Okpara & Idowu, 2013, p. xv).

Today, in this rapidly changing business world, organizations focus more than ever on corporate social responsibility as a strategy to achieve their overall business objectives and attain sustainability. The first well-established definition of employee engagement was “harnessing of organizations members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively and emotionally during role performances” (Khan, 1990: p. 694). Employee engagement could identify as one of the major contributors to face competitiveness (Aktar & Pangil, 2017). Further, engaged employees are vital in achieving the competitive advantage because all other production factors could be initiated by the competitive organizations except the human resource (Ncube & Jerie, 2012).

The theories of engagement primarily focus on the relationship between employees and their organization, and the theories of CSR focus on the relationship between the organization and the community they operate. Interestingly, employees represent a considerable quota of that community.The conceptual framework for motivating and engaging employees using CSR provides the follow scheme:

CSR principles strategy Application

• Transparent and  open Communication
• Respect and mutuality
• Sharing common values
• Reciprocity

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Employees Engagement

• Dedication
• Absortion
• Vigor

The high CSR performance of the company is depended in part on a company’s employees, who have various attitudes towards sustainability matters.

The employees’ perceptions of their organizational CSR may influence how well CSR is done in the lodging sector of tourism.

When employees are aware of the organization’s involvement in CRS, they perceive that together with their organization they can make a positive difference for other people and for the environment. The awareness of CSR initiatives in the tourism sector employees related positively to extra-helping behaviour and personal initiatives. As a result, employees’ awareness of CSR activities was the main factor that drew positive results.

Sustainable development drives the need for the adoption of CSR in companies, and adequate means of monitoring its success to be able to operate to its full potential in the current world, driven by the awareness of sustainability issues. Organizations and employees should take the concept of sustainable development as a guiding principle in all its activities to ensure good lives for the future generation. However, even though the CSR concept had been studied extensively, several studies found the gap in knowledge.

Employee engagement, also called “commitment” or “motivation”, refers to a psychological state where employees feel a stake in the company’s success and perform to a high standard that may exceed the basic requirements of the job.

Among all, an important approach/factor to ensure the employees’ engagement and motivation is related to the “Meaningfulness” that corresponds to the feeling of return on investment of efforts, safety to the ability to express oneself freely without fear of consequences and availability to self- efficacy, available resources and one’s belief in being competent to perform one’s work.

The employees will become engaged in their work if the specific conditions or three needs related to their work are met. These are psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety, and psychological availability. People experiencing meaningfulness feel worthwhile, useful, and valuable. A meaningful job for an employee will be challenging, varied, will provide feedback and growth opportunities, rewards and recognition, and will be flexible and autonomous to some degree. With the help of these factors, employees will express themselves in work situations and as a result will become more engaged in their work.

Having felt the responsibility of performing well, Individuals start to respond to higher expectations with higher engagement. Similarly, autonomy refers to the freedom of scheduling of the work and choosing procedures to carry it out. The satisfaction of autonomy motivates employees to be more proactive and engaged. Likewise, feedback aids in employees’ feeling of meaningfulness because it helps to evaluate their progress towards goals and gives a feeling of being valued, known and appreciated.

Employees ‘engagement depends on employees’ perceptions of CSR strategies and upon the way CSR strategies are led and communicated to them. 

The importance of specific CRS action would motivate employees even further to engage voluntarily. Employees may as well perceive the involvement of management as a factor proving CSR value and enhancing employees’ engagement. In contrast,” a lack of senior management participation caused some employees to question the values of leadership and the reasons why the organization asked them to engage in CSR”.

An organisation does not exist in isolation. It relies on multiple interdependent relationships with customers, employees, suppliers, communities and investors; in other words your organisation’s stakeholders.

The social responsibility of the company is based on the commitment with the interested parties for the achievement of corporate sustainability. Cultural and structural factors, the values of the organization, management style, empowerment and teamwork should be considered together, when adopting a CSR strategy, especially if it is aimed at developing innovative behaviour.

Stakeholders including investors, customers, regulators, communities, and NGOs see the value of sustainable strategy to an organization.

Consumers are increasingly demanding more sustainable products and services as they seek to achieve their own sustainability and business goals. Increasingly, employees are seeing sustainable organizations as employers of choice.

CSR drives value because it focuses on levers that drive opportunity, mitigate risks, reduce resource utilization, and leverage cooperation and collaboration. In addition, taking a broader holistic approach to organizational management by considering local and global communities, resource scarcity, air quality, and the health and happiness of employees creates a more productive and effective workplace.

Stakeholders are all the physical or legal entities that interact with a company and its business. This ranges from internal employees to customers, business partners, public authorities and suppliers.

Different stakeholders have different relationships with the company:

• Active economic stakeholders (suppliers, business partners, customers, employees)
• Observers and/or influencers (non-profit organisations, trade unions, lobbies, government)
• Beneficiaries or victims, depending on the positive/negative and direct/indirect effects of the company’s activities (local communities, )

Corporate social responsibility grants stakeholders a far more important role than before. They have become an essential component of the strategy. A responsible company’s ‘impact culture’ is built on the balance between its economic, environmental and social concerns. CSR teams are tasked with protecting this balance and setting impact improvement targets. Another of their tasks is to ensure transparency and an inclusive approach to stakeholders.

A company’s prosperity depends partly on creating shared benefit since without its stakeholders, a company cannot continue to develop and evolve.

This added value opens the way for collaborative innovation and the possibility of creating tailored products and services. It also helps to provide a holistic view of your CSR strategy.

CSR communication is a communicative practice, which corporations undertake to integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders.

CSR requires that whom operate and apply CSR principles must have specific and tailored skills and competences on Communication, matching the CSR approach and ethical conduct.

Communication is an important part of a business, in both the internal communication that must be mediated between employees and different departments, as well as the external communication that must take place to the stakeholders who are connected to the organization. Such skills must include different components that match the Corporate Social Responsibility Communication expressed in the CSR mind-set. Since CSR is considered as a ‘way of thinking’ and is part of the organisation’s core business, communication must highlight its role as a valuable component of corporate culture to all stakeholders. CSR in communication processes puts the interests and requirements of stakeholders at the centre of the organisation’s attention. It combines stakeholders’ interests into all strategic decisions and procedures in order to reinforce member identification.

CSR communication is a difficult undertaking because it bears a variety of threats and opportunities. For this reason, the right CSR communication strategy is essential to effectively influence consumer attitude and behaviour.

Creative communication (presence of striking, relevant, and understandable content) is essential components for a CSR communication that is not a merely transmission of information (i.e. objectives, intentions, activities), but it goes beyond that because is it based in a continuous process of exploration, construction, negotiation, and modification among different actors.

Communication on Corporate Social Responsibility should be based on a bilateral interaction that engages stakeholders in the communication process while developing and implementing a CSR strategy, enabling establishment of the dialogue. The communication toolkit of implementing the

CSR strategy on establishing dialogue with stakeholders should take into account different and tailored approaches and tools that should be used for this purpose. These tools and approaches for organizing a stakeholder communication process, take into account communication barriers at each stage: creation, encoding, transmission, receiving, decoding and responding.

While “Empathy” is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing—and here is the important bit—from within their frame of reference. It is often incorrectly confused with or assumed to be the same as sympathy.

There is a deep connection between empathy and genuine CSR built on a company’s core values. Where values like honesty and social justice are prioritized, empathy becomes the bedrock of social initiatives. Companies are made up of employees, each with their own individual and shared experiences, social groups, and cultural differences. Listening to and identifying empathetic employees who are passionate about causes can help inspire support and push for social initiatives their company can then stand behind. Empathy is also a way for companies to put their employees first and truly get to know more about them and what motivates and drives them.

The Empathy, within the CSR practices and communication fosters a faster process of successful stakeholders, employees and customer’s engagement, achieving in a deeper and sustainable way, a long-term influence of its benefits.

In this case, for example, the CSR Empathy in its self can have an indirect effect of employee empathy on customer loyalty (CL) and loyalty outcomes through intervening variables, i.e. customer affective commitment, perceived service quality, and customer satisfaction.

Everybody has a degree of empathy and anybody can develop and cultivate their empathy using approaches and developing specific skills and competences, as:

• Understanding its own biases
• Reading fiction and other activities to put you in someone else’s shoes
• Maintaining positivity
• Understanding its own customer base
• Get feedback from its own peers and customers

Expressing empathy is as important as cultivating it and helps to deliver great customer service. Customers need to know that the organizations do understand how they feel through words, tone of voice, body language, and other cues depending on how the conversation is happening. Some

ways, that are part of the requested skills and competences, in which it is possible to empathize with a customer, are related to:

• Active listening
• Avoiding sympathy
• Keeping its own attitude in check
• Giving people the benefit of doubt
• Making customers a part of the solution
• Looking for common interests
• Always be respectful
• Responding to the customer’s tone
• Be extra careful when there is a language barrier
• Take their side when they are right

CSR concept has evolved over time and has changed the way innovation is conceived. The state of art shows that CSR activities have been responsively introduced to achieve the stakeholders’ needs and standards, to become gradually more strategic activities.

Sustainable innovations are effective tools to foster CSR activities and, therefore, social performance. In this context, the CSR-innovation influence is driven by specific channels such as the company’s competitiveness, strategies’ developments, and framework.

Innovation are the foundation of business competencies. CRS and innovation has emerged slowly over the past decade and their improvements in the CRS process can refer to as ‘social innovation’. The only successful brands of the future will be the ones that see these challenges as opportunities for innovation, rather than risks to be alleviated. CSR represent “the integrity with which a company govern itself, fulfils its mission, lives by its value, engages with its stakeholders, measures its impact and reports on its activities”. CRS and innovation mainly refers to Corporate Social Innovation, which is related to a product innovation with a social purpose.

In addition, corporate social innovation focuses as change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better.

The key skills and capabilities that businesses need to look for when hiring and developing talent to drive social innovation are a core aspect of CSR business growth. These key skills include:

1. Creativity—taking multiple inputs to come up with new ideas to solve issues;
2. Dealing with ambiguity—can handle change and uncertainty;
3. Business acumen—wide view of business and operating environments;
4. Motivating others—at all levels in the business to work collectively;
5. Interpersonal savvy—social connectedness, open minded and adaptable;
6. Perspective—looks towards the broadest possible view of an issue/challenge;
7. Listening—practices attentive and active listening with patience to hear all sides;
8. Dealing with paradox—flexible and adaptable to combine seeming opposites

Its key recommendations to companies on embedding social innovation into company culture in such a way that staff with these skill sets can thrive are:

• Define a social purpose and make it core to business activities
• Embed social innovation in leadership communications and actions
• Establish a social innovation role and create social innovation champions in departments
• Include social innovation in the learning and development plans of all functions
• Foster an environment that encourages cross-functional collaboration
• Collaborate with wider stakeholders who have skills and knowledge
• Include social impact assessment within reward frameworks
• Establish measure and report on social innovation activities and social impact

Beyond attracting and developing talent with the above skills in order to embed social innovation within a company, the following will help build the right culture and work environment to ensure the integration of social innovation into core business strategy:

• People—support and encouragement from the top of the organization on down, giving employees the time and space to deeply explore social issues and idea generation;
• Processes—have the framework in place to be able to collaborate internally and externally, including creating forums to frame social issues;
• Systems—define measure and communicate performance metrics to ensure the company delivers and maintains high-impact