An increasing number of companies proclaim that they have a higher purpose beyond profits, expecting to gain positive employee-related outcomes. Corporate sustainability (CS) activities can help companies live up to their lofty aspirations. However, CS activities are not all alike. For one thing, importantly, they differ in the degree to which they are embedded in a company’s core business. Although scholars and practitioners propose that embedded (as opposed to peripheral) CS will be more beneficial in engaging its employees, empirical evidence comparing these two types of CS activities is scarce and critical contingencies are unknown. Drawing on the literature of organizational identification and cue diagnosticity, we derive a novel conceptual framework proposing that the involvement of employees in a company’s embedded CS activities is critical to realizing enhanced levels of beneficial employee-related outcomes such as organizational identification and work engagement while also increasing employees’ awareness of a company’s higher purpose. A between-subjects experiment amongst employees of a manufacturer of building materials and a supplemental study with pharmaceutical company employees provides evidence for our reasoning. Our study provides a nuanced understanding of the role of CS embeddedness and thereby addresses the demand in research to classify different types of CS activities to better understand stakeholder responses to CS. We further provide hands-on implications on activating employees on a large scale to achieve a company’s CS-related goals and, through this, bring its higher purpose to life.
