The effect of different types of CSR on eWOM intentionsand behaviors of employees.

Having positive employees as online ambassadors for your organization can be valuable. Especially social networking sites (SNS) are a platform on which information can be spread widely and rapidly. This study focuses on a specific part of online ambassadorship, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). The things employees say about an organization in an online context can be a significant predictor of an organization its reputation. To attract important stakeholders, such as consumers, future employees and investors, a positive reputation is of great importance. Research shows that one way to engage employees in online ambassadorship on social media is through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication. Gaps in the literature however exist with regards to the deeper understanding of CSR. Therefore this research looked into the different CSR topics (economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic) and their effect on eWOM intentions and behaviors of employees. This study has focussed on the SNS Facebook, as it is still the most widely used social media platform. Online ambassadorship of employees can be important for all sorts of organizations. However, most research that has been done has looked into the effects for bigger companies. This research was designed to add to the literature about employee engagement in small medium businesses (SMEs) as these kinds of businesses represent a large amount of organizations in Europe. Among Dutch SMEs, a survey was conducted to measure the eWOM intentions and an experiment was conducted to measure the actual eWOM behaviors. This mixed methods approach was used to look for differences between the intentions of employees and their actual actions. The results of the survey showed that there is no direct effect between CSR types and eWOM, but there is an indirect relationship: economic and legal-ethical CSR have a positive effect on organizational identification, which in turn has a positive effect on eWOM. The experiment showed no significant relationships, although the results indicated that ethical-philanthropic CSR had the most positive effect on eWOM behaviors of employees. This research first of all concludes that the findings contribute to the existing literature on organizational identification and CSR, as CSR can have a positive effect on organizational identification. However, this research suggests that a more specific CSR measuring instrument needs to be created for studying the effects of CSR in a SME context.