Attitudes of employees in green companies regarding CSR communication

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to discern how the Best Green companies, as identified by Newsweek, communicate about green jobs within their companies.

Design/methodology/approach

Content analysis using NVivo software on 23 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports containing 398,000 words and Glassdoor crowdsourced data were analyzed. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression enabled the discernment of relationships.

Findings

Several models were developed to predict how communication patterns (employee-centered, production or company centered and society centered) are associated with several Glassdoor ratings: The models developed by logistic regression accurately predicted the following: Glassdoor ratings: Overall 65.2%, Benefits 71.4%, Attitudes towards Chief Executive Officer (CEO) 65.2% and Recommend To A Friend 78.3%.

Originality/value

It supports communicating about green jobs in CSR reports and suggests other avenues for communicating, including PR, press releases and career pages of company websites. The hypotheses that were empirically verified include the relationship between employees-centered terms (in the CSR reports) and employee attitudes (Glassdoor measures) and return on assets (ROA) (company financials). These practices have manpower impacts, including recruitment and retention. The study's methodology allows for replication since it used publicly available CSR reports, ROA of public companies and crowdsourcing data from Glassdoor ratings. It has implications for public policy in that understanding the nature of green jobs will improve outcomes for public training programs.

Citation

LaVan, H., Zilic, I. and Basappa, S. (2022), "Attitudes of employees in green companies regarding CSR communication", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 43 No. 6, pp. 1301-1315. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-11-2020-0542