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Employee Reactions to Opportunistically Motivated Selective Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure

Zhiping Mao

Journal of Management Accounting Research2026https://doi.org/10.2308/jmar-2024-073article
AJG 2ABDC A*
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

ABSTRACT This study examines how employees respond when they become aware that their firm engages in opportunistically motivated selective corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. Employees’ proximity to CSR initiatives enables them to detect disclosure selectivity and form inferences about the firm’s underlying motive for engaging in such disclosure. Drawing on social norm theory, I predict and find that employees misreport performance to the firm and shirk in a joint task with a peer to a greater extent when selective disclosure is perceived as opportunistically motivated. Awareness of selectivity alone is insufficient to trigger these responses. These findings highlight the central role of perceived motive in making an opportunism norm salient and demonstrate that motive-based norm salience produces behavioral spillovers across contexts. Overall, the results show that opportunistically motivated CSR disclosure can backfire internally by harming both firms and peers. Data Availability: Data are available from the author upon request.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2308/jmar-2024-073

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@article{zhiping2026,
  title        = {{Employee Reactions to Opportunistically Motivated Selective Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure}},
  author       = {Zhiping Mao},
  journal      = {Journal of Management Accounting Research},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2308/jmar-2024-073},
}

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Employee Reactions to Opportunistically Motivated Selective Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.