Tell Me How You Treat Your Employees

In communicating their good deeds to customers, most companies focus on company-external discretionary Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities such as philanthropy. In contrast with this prevailing managerial practice, the present paper proposes that customers react less positively to communications on how companies allocate profits to company-external good causes and more positively to communications on how companies make their profits in the first place, i.e., how they treat their employees. A preliminary study among customers of an international retailer ( N = 11,587) suggests that customers perceive the domain of employee CSR to be significantly more important than other CSR domains. Based on a qualitative study using focus-group interviews, the authors propose that employee support CSR messages elicit the highest intrinsic attributions among customers and enhance customer identification with the company. A large-scale field experiment of customers of the focal retailer ( N = 5,586) delivers evidence that supports these propositions for four real CSR communication messages from different CSR domains. More specifically, the study results suggest that an employee support message elicits the most positive customer responses, not only by increasing attributions of the company's intrinsic motives for engaging in CSR but also by increasing customer identification with the company.