RESEARCH ARTICLE Corporate sustainable actions through United Nations sustainable development goals: The internal customer's response Virginia Munro 1 | Denni Arli 2 1 Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Australia 2 Labovitz School of Business and Economics, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, USA Correspondence Virginia Munro, Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Nathan Campus, Building No. 63, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan, Queensland 4111, Australia. Email: munro.coms@gmail.com; v. munro@griffith.edu.au Designing sustainable corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy utilizing the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) framework to deal with consumption in a sustainable and responsible fashion is increasingly a requirement in emerging economies. This paper examines sustainable social initiatives (SIs) via a CSR model and social lens as part of the SDG framework for multinational enterprises (MNEs), to determine the perception of the internal customer and stakeholder (i.e., the employee) alongside their identification and voluntary engagement in their organization's SIs. The study examines internal customers (as the employee) of two MNEs who reside in a developed country and two developing countries from emerging economies. The findings indicate that identifi- cation with the SDG-based SIs selected by MNEs for this study mediates the relationship between perception of their organization's perceived CSR and engagement in these initiatives, for employees in developing countries (and emerging markets) but not the developed country. This suggests the importance that internal employees “identify” with SDG-based SIs in emerging markets in par- ticular and builds on significant managerial implications for MNEs in these mar- kets alongside their voluntary work with nonprofits as part of their SIs and CSR strategy. The findings also confirm the importance of MNEs adopting SIs that are not only relevant to the global United Nations SDG framework but also relevant to the actors, collaborators, and nonprofit organizations involved in these SIs, including stakeholders and in particular the internal customer (i.e., employee) who volunteer their time to implement these SIs in the communities where MNEs reside. 1 | INTRODUCTION A literature search of sustainable activities under the umbrella of cor- porate social responsibility (CSR) strategy reveals a predominance of literature more often examining developing countries actions on envi- ronmental problems (Child & Tsai, 2005; Vergragt, Akenji, & Dewick, 2014; Yadav & Pathak, 2017) rather than the social side of sustainabil- ity and CSR (Munro, 2013). There is also a lack of research examining the volunteering side of sustainability and CSR in developing coun- tries (Zappala & Cronin, 2002). The current paper attempts to fill this research gap by empirically examining social sustainability through the analysis of multinational enterprise (MNE) CSR social initiatives (SIs), including the initiatives partnered with nonprofit organizations (NGOs) and the initiatives needed in the communities where the MNE resides. Their employees (as members of those communities) are often voluntarily engaging in CSR SIs. Here, SIs are defined as the “social Received: 28 September 2018 Revised: 18 January 2019 Accepted: 16 August 2019 DOI: 10.1002/nvsm.1660 Int J Nonprofit Volunt Sect Mark. 2019;e1660. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nvsm © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 15 https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.1660