Predicting employee engagement with micro-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the public accounting firms

Purpose - This research aims to examines the impact of micro-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on employee engagement within the public accounting firm setting. Design/methodology/approach - This research uses a quantitative approach with a survey instrument as the data collection tool. A total of 269 complete responses were collected from employees working in the public accounting firms. Micro-level CSR practices were analysed with a hierarchical component model (HCM) in partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to examine the influence of such practices on employee engagement. A predictive performance metric was applied to assess the out-of-sample prediction. Findings - This study uncovers a positive and significant relationship between micro-level CSR practices and employee engagement. Furthermore, the PLSpredict results indicate that the current model possesses high predictive power with all indicators in the PLS-SEM analysis demonstrating lower root mean squared error (RMSE) values compared to the naïve linear regression model benchmark. Research limitations/implications - While the methods applied in this analysis are at the frontier of CSR research, the present study has not explored the heterogeneity amongst groups of respondents and size of accounting firms. Sampling weight adjustment for the purposes of representativeness was not used in the current research. These could be the subject of future work in this area. Practical implications - These research findings shed light on the positive manifestation effect of micro-level CSR practices at firm level as well as individual level. Through micro-level CSR practices, firms can reap the benefits of enhanced employee engagement, which leads to productive workforce while also facilitating increased employees’ intrinsic job satisfaction. Social implications - Micro-level CSR practices address the needs of the millennium workforce, whereby employees are no longer solely focussed on pay checks as their compensation. Employees are seeking out employers whose CSR practices appeal to their social conscience. Micro-level CSR practices meet the needs of the contemporary workforce yet enable companies to attract and retain skilled employees. Originality/value - The originality of this research is attributed to the vigorous statistical analysis by the use of HCMs and PLSpredict in PLS-SEM context for the assessment of predictive performance. Also, micro-level CSR practices are conceptualised in HCM for parsimonious purpose.