Corporate purpose has been experiencing a renaissance among both scholars and practitioners. Researchers have demonstrated that when corporate purpose is expressed in a prosocial manner, it enhances firm performance by positively impacting employees. However, these findings have focused almost exclusively on workers from the primary sector of the labor market – that is, on white-collar workers. Further, evidence suggests that corporate initiatives targeting societal goals often resonate less in blue-collar workplaces than in white-collar settings. This, in turn, raises an important question: Are blue-collar workers attracted to expressions of corporate purpose like white-collar workers? In this paper, we argue that they will not be, with the core premise of our theory being that compared to white-collar workers, blue-collar workers are more attracted to a firm that expresses a corporate purpose explicitly emphasizing reinvestment in its employees compared to a general prosocial purpose. We tested this argument by partnering with a US-based care management firm to conduct a large-scale field experiment involving 4,874 job seekers. The primary result is that blue-collar workers are more attracted to the firm in the stakeholder reinvestment condition than in the prosocial condition. In contrast, the opposite was true for white-collar workers. We theorize that organizational (dis)trust drives these results.
