(The) pursuit of philanthropy at the expense of creativity

Abstract

The consequences of employee volunteering, one of the most significant trends in Corporate Social Responsibility strategy, is often investigated under the assumption that such prosocial activity is good for everyone. However, in this article, we demonstrate that there is a negative side of the employee volunteering as well. Using Conservation of Resources theory, we investigate the resource investment in employee volunteering during work time can influence employee’s performance in creativity tasks. Furthermore, we show that this negative relationship does not exist for those employees with high level of affective commitment.