Corporate Volunteering: A Three-Paper Dissertation

Over the past decades, corporate volunteering has gained importance as a strategic component of organizations’ social and environmental responsibility. Across three empirical studies (Chapters 2 – 4), I advance the literature on the antecedents and outcomes of volunteering, focusing on employees and their employers. In Chapter 1, I examine behavioral and emotional antecedents of employees’ engagement in corporate volunteering using a field experiment in a large bank. In Chapter 2, I systematize the individual-level literature on employees’ engagement in both corporate and personal volunteering using a meta-analytic approach. In Chapter 3, I switch levels of analysis and examine firm-level consequences of corporate volunteering, such as internal mobility rates and corporate environmental performance. Notably, throughout the three studies, I go beyond the traditionally examined benefits of corporate volunteering for employees, to incorporate the beneficial effects of corporate volunteering for organizations, society, and the natural environment. Thus, this dissertation advances research on both the business case and the sustainability case for corporate social responsibility.