SPECIAL ISSUE Corporate social responsibility and employee outcomes: The role of country context Tay K. McNamara 1 | Rene Carapinha 2 | Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes 3 | Monique Valcour 1 | Sharon Lobel 4 1 Center on Aging & Work, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 2 Carapinha & Company (C&C), Boston, Massachusetts 3 Graduate School of Social Work, Boston College and Center on Aging & Work, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 4 Albers School of Business and Economics, Seattle University, Seattle, Washington Correspondence Tay K. McNamara, Center on Aging & Work, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, 3 Lake Street Building, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. Email: mcnamatd@bc.edu This study examined the association between employee perceptions of two foci of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and work attitudes in different countries. Using data collected as part of a multinational research project with a core team in the United States, we found that perceptions of externally focused CSR enactment were positively associated with employee engagement and affective commitment. Perceptions of internally focused CSR enactment were positively associ- ated with affective commitment but not with employee engagement. Analyses across countries revealed more cultural than economic differences. For example, perceptions of internally focused CSR enactment were consistently associated with affective commitment across cultural contexts, indicating that they might serve as a general foundation for building commitment. Perceptions of externally focused CSR were more strongly associated with affective commitment in Anglo than in Confucian and Latin American countries, suggesting a need for country-specific tailoring. Based on these results, we provided recommendations for planning and implementation of CSR. 1 | BACKGROUND In this study, we aim to help bridge the gap between the literature on comparative corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the literature on the micro-level foundations of CSR. Using a large cross-national sample of employees, we compare the relationships between employee per- ceptions of CSR, employee valuing of CSR, and micro-level outcomes, paying particular attention to variations according to cultural cluster. While existing literature defines CSR in many ways (Rivoli & Waddock, 2011; Taneja, Taneja, & Gupta, 2011), companies with an interest in CSR typically address some or all of the elements associated with the “triple bottom line”: economic value (profit), environmental impact (planet), and social impact (people and communities) (Elkington, 1997). “Social impact” subsumes a wide range of different stakeholder groups such as customers and shareholders (Carroll, 1999; Freeman, 1994; Mueller, Hattrup, Spiess, & Lin-Hi, 2012; Taneja et al., 2011), each of which may articulate different expectations for their organiza- tion’s CSR activities and may respond to the enactment of those activ- ities in different ways. Employees are an important group of “internal stakeholders” (see Jamali, 2008), or stakeholders within the administra- tive limits of the organization (Rodrigo & Arenas, 2008). In the present paper, we shed light on employee attitudes as a critical element of the micro-level foundations of CSR. Research affirms that the relative value that people place on CSR (henceforth referred to as valuing) can differ substantially. But because valuing, like other attitudes, encompasses a complex mix of cognitive, affective, and behavioral components (Rodrigo & Arenas, 2008), it is difficult to determine how much of the variation between employees occurs at a cultural level and how much is truly individual. Some stud- ies, such as Ralston and colleagues (2014), argue that existing research generally attributes too much of the variance in attitudes toward CSR to cultural values. However, other studies such as Jamali and Neville (2011) argue instead that the cosmetic convergence in CSR policies around the world is misleading and masks deep differences in underly- ing definitions of CSR. For instance, the focus (or target stakeholder group) of CSR may tilt heavily toward internal stakeholders such as employees or toward external stakeholders such as society at large, making comparisons of attitudes toward CSR complex at best. The present paper begins by delving into the puzzle of how much of the difference in micro-level attitudes toward CSR occurs as a con- sequence of differences in cultural values, how much occurs as a con- sequence of differences in individual valuing, and how much is attributable to differences in the focus of the CSR initiative or policy. Because differences in the tacit definitions of CSR may underlie surface-level convergence in CSR policies (Jamali & Neville, 2011) and because of the relative lack of research on CSR and employee attitudes Business Ethics: A Eur Rev. 2017;26:413–427. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/beer V C 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd | 413 DOI: 10.1111/beer.12163