Conceptualisation: The Interrelationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility, Employer Branding and Co-creation

Brix, Elisabeth ; Averhoff, Charlotte Vestergaard

4. term

International Business Communication (English), Master

2020

2020-05-31

107 pages

Retaining employees, and the costs hereof, is an increasing international challenge that organisations face. This thesis specifically focusses on the retention of employees belonging to Generation Y and Z since an increasing share of today’s international workforce is made up of employees belonging to these generations, and their generational characteristics make them prone to leaving organisations within few years of being employed. The aim of this thesis is to analyse how to retain employees belonging to these two generations and how a combination of the three theoretical fields of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), employer branding and co-creation can help provide a solution to the international challenge of retention. With this analysis, this thesis contributes to assisting in filling a knowledge gap concerning the combination of these three theoretical fields. Filling a knowledge gap requires extensive knowledge of the existing literature in the given field. To gather the data that constitutes the theoretical foundation for this thesis, a systematic literature review is conducted, hereunder seven elaborate literature reviews concerning different and related theoretical fields. Firstly, three of the literature reviews concern each of the three theoretical fields separately, followed by a literature review of the literature combining CSR, employer branding and co-creation. Because there is a call for more research combining these three theoretical fields, three additional literature reviews are conducted to clarify the interrelationships between each of the possible combinations of these three fields, e.g. CSR and employer branding. The literature reviews are used in order to analyse the interrelationship be-tween CSR, employer branding and co-creation and conceptualise a possible solution to the challenge of retaining employees from Generation Y and Z. The analysis shows that a combination of the three theoretical fields has the ability to affect employee retention positively by including employees in the act of co-creating CSR values. By making it a part of an internal employer branding process, employees become more motivated and engaged, which affect their job satisfaction and therefore, theoretically, increase employee retention. To support the theoretical findings of this analysis, this thesis includes suggestions for and discussions of future research, where methods for collecting empirical data are elaborately discussed. With the focus of this thesis being on theory development and thereby being a solely theoretical contribution, a future study including empirical research would provide a means for testing our conceptualisation in practice.

Corporate Social Responsibility ; CSR ; Employer Branding ; Co-creation ; Co-creation of values ; Conceptualisation ; Employee Retention ; Generation Y ; Generation Z

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