Stakeholder Existential Authenticity and Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research has been slow to address the impacts of CSR on stakeholders, especially in terms of the mechanisms explaining how CSR translates into positive stakeholder outcomes. We introduce a new mechanism into this literature – stakeholder existential authenticity (SEA) – that helps explain how stakeholder participation in CSR can enhance stakeholder wellbeing through the experience of being authentic. We develop an original conceptualization of SEA and integrate this into a model explaining the relationships between CSR participation, SEA, eudaimonic happiness, and subjective wellbeing, as well as the moderating effects of individual stakeholder attributes and CSR activity design. We explain our contributions to the literature on society‐centric CSR, authenticity in CSR, CSR implementation, and authenticity in management more broadly, before suggesting directions for future research and outlining the practical implications of our study.