Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management

Human resource professionals have an important role to play to assist an organisation attain its CSR goals. Employee involvement is a vigorous success factor for CSR performance. Human resource managers have the tools and the opportunity to influence employee responsibility to, and commitment in, the firms CSR strategy. Human resource managers are well positioned to play an influential role in helping their organisation accomplish its goals of becoming a socially and environmentally responsible organisation. Further, human resource (HR) professionals in organisations that perceive successful corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a key driver of their financial performance, can be influential in realising on that objective. Human resource management can play a significant role so that CSR can become the way we do things around here. HR can be the key organisational partner to ensure that what the organisation is saying publicly aligns with how people are treated within the organisation. HR is in the enviable position of being able to provide the tools and framework for the executive team and CEO to embed CSR ethic and culture into the brand and the strategic framework of the organisation. Despite a significant increase in research and practice relating corporate social responsibility (CSR) and human resource management (HRM), a comprehensive examination of the relationship between these two constructs has yet to be undertaken. Scholars associating CSR and HRM rarely explicate their understanding of the connection between CSR and HRM or the assumptions they make when exploring this relationship.