Slack resources and employee-centered corporate social responsibility in restaurant companies

Although the importance of superior stakeholder relationships in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives is well-established in the literature, research on the antecedents of such investments on salient stakeholders, like employees, and in particular industry contexts is lacking. In this paper, we explore an important antecedent of employee-centered CSR initiatives in the restaurant industry, that is, slack resources. We consider the restaurant industry an ideal context for this study due to the prevalence of limited slack resources, and the salience of employees for customer service, satisfaction, and eventual firm performance. Using a panel dataset of 430 observations of publicly traded firms in the USA, we find that slack resources contribute to socially responsible policies towards employees, yet slack resources do not alleviate any employee-related concerns in the restaurant sector. The findings on the differential effect of slack resources on employee-centered CSR initiatives and concerns provide practical implications and directions for future research.