Prior research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggests that employees’ views of organizational CSR contribute to their favorable evaluations of their organizations, which in turn lead to their positive attitudes and behaviors at work. Although internal and external stakeholders often have differing expectations of an organization—leading to potentially divergent evaluations of the organization’s CSR—little research has examined how the incongruence between employees’ own CSR evaluations and their perceptions of outsiders’ CSR evaluations may influence employees’ reactions toward their organizations. By integrating the organizational image literature with intergroup emotion theory, we develop a model that explains when, why, and for whom CSR image incongruence may lead to positive and negative outcomes (i.e., employees’ emotional ambivalence about their organizations, and their subsequent reactions in terms of loyalty boosterism and distancing). Moreover, we identify employees’ moral identity internalization as a moderator that can mitigate the effects of CSR image incongruence on employee responses. Our model is supported by a scenario-based experiment and a time-lagged survey study using polynomial regression and response surface analyses. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.
