sustainability Article The Impact of Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility on Frontline Employee’s Emotional Labor Strategies Seonggoo Ji 1 and Ihsan Ullah Jan 2, * 1 Department of Business Administration and Accounting, Hanbat National University, Daejeon 34158, Korea; sgji@hanbat.ac.kr 2 Department of Business Administration, Hanbat National University, Daejeon 34158, Korea * Correspondence: ihsjan10@gmail.com; Tel.: +82-42-821-1287 Received: 21 January 2019; Accepted: 21 March 2019; Published: 25 March 2019   Abstract: This study explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility and emotional labor strategies of frontline employees. In particular, the research focuses on the impact of perceived motives of corporate social responsibility on the cynicism, authenticity, and subsequently, the effect of cynicism and authenticity on surface acting and deep acting of frontline employees. Based on the online survey of 258 frontline employees in South Korea and structural equation modeling of the data, the ﬁndings show that the selﬁsh motives of corporate social responsibility (CSR) increase cynicism whereas the altruistic motives of corporate social responsibility increase authenticity and decrease cynicism of frontline employees. In addition, this study reveals that CSR-cynicism leads to surface acting and reduces deep acting whereas CSR-authenticity increases deep acting and does not signiﬁcantly affect surface acting of frontline employees. Keywords: corporate social responsibility; authenticity; cynicism; deep acting; surface acting 1. Introduction Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been discussed in the business environment for decades. A signiﬁcant number of studies in the prior literature have found that CSR practices around the globe have positive impact on the success of business [1,2]. Primarily, scholars and practitioners hold the same view that one of the key component of an organization’s competitive advantage and ultimate success relates to its responsibility to employees and its undertaken efforts for CSR [3–5]. Despite the emerging importance of the CSR on the businesses a handful studies have focused on the inﬂuence of CSR on the employees in general and frontline employees in particular. For instance, a few studies have investigated job satisfaction [6], organizational commitment [7], and employee’s attachment [8], in relation to CSR activities. More recently, Onkila has discussed the perception of CSR for employees in the Finish ﬁnancial ﬁrms and concluded that positive perception of CSR leads to positive outcomes such as satisfaction whereas negative perception leads to dissatisfaction [9]. Similarly, in the context of South Korea too, the perception of CSR has been explored in relation to the employees such as customer-directed counter work behaviors [10], organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behaviors [11], organizational identiﬁcation [12], creativity, compassion, and intrinsic motivation of employees [13]. Hence, new empirical studies are needed to further broaden the signiﬁcance of perceived CSR in the literature with respect to some overlooked attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of employees. Since, frontline employees play pivotal roles as boundary spanners in the service industry. Because of their frequent interactions to customers frontline employees experience emotional exhaustion and Sustainability 2019, 11, 1780; doi:10.3390/su11061780 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability