This study examines frontline employee responses to corporate social
responsibility (CSR) using a multi-sourced data set at a Global 500
financial services company. The authors find that frontline employees
identify with the organization (i.e., organizational identification) and
with customers (i.e., employee–customer identification) as a function
of how much the employees perceive management and customers
(respectively) to support the company’s CSR activities. However, these
respective effects are stronger among employees for whom CSR is already
tied to their sense of self (i.e., CSR importance to the employee). In
addition, both organizational identification and employee–customer
identification are related to supervisor-rated job performance; however,
only the effect of employee–customer identification is mediated by
customer orientation, suggesting that these two targets of
identification manifest through distinct mechanisms. The research
empirically addresses the open questions of whether and when CSR can
yield observable changes in employee behavior and alerts researchers to a
novel target of identification for frontline employees. [ABSTRACT FROM
AUTHOR]