You have probably heard it before: employees who work for a company with sustainability values are more committed, more satisfied, and less likely to leave. These lines come up in most sustainability communications, in the part where we talk about the benefits.
But honestly, I have worked in many companies, and I have known many people and many corporate cultures. And nobody has ever told me, over a coffee or having lunch together in the company canteen, that they were happy to work there because the company had sustainability values, because it cared about the environment and about society.
Which makes me wonder. Does being a company with values really have a positive impact on the people who work there? And is it something the company gains from?
So I went to the evidence. I reviewed 30 academic studies, from meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of employees to experiments with real job seekers, across different countries and different industries.
OTHER QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS ARTICLE
A company with values: does it make a difference to employees, yes or no?
Let’s kill the suspense. Yes, it does. It is proved through a meta-analysis by Paruzel and colleagues (2021), one of the largest research on this question, based on 132 studies, around 90,000 employees across 24 countries. It looked at seven outcomes and measured if there was a linked effect and how “statistically significant” (which means, if it’s big enough to matter). You can see the results in the following graph.
The labels under the chart (noticeable, moderate, strong) are my own convention for reading these figures, which run from 0 to 1. All seven links are statistically solid: none of the confidence intervals touches zero.
Some of the conclusions:
There is an effect on all the outcomes, and it matters (more than 0.3 is already relevant in statistics).
Organizational commitment was the one identified through most of the studies, and the second in strength, with work engagement the strongest of all.
On the lowest on the scale, but still relevant, was the lower turnover intention.
In this field, those are large numbers, and the authors found no sign that the good results were being cherry-picked for publication.
So far, the story the industry tells holds up.
But, as always, the devil is in the details. The paper looks mostly at how employees feel, or what they say they would do (most of the studies were based on surveys and questionnaires), so we should always hold the doubt: are they honest in their answers? Also, the picture can change according to the geography. Paruzel's research mixed employees with very different cultures, half of them from outside western societies.
Now, the main question is answered. It matters.
But still, our trip is just starting. We are specifically visiting some of the juiciest topics, with additional research about when and how it matters.
Attracting talent
A company seen as responsible looks more appealing to the people it wants to hire. We saw it in Paruzel's meta-analysis.
The interesting part is the condition attached to it.
The best study on hiring I found is a set of three by Ong, Kim and Koopman: archive data on Fortune 500 companies, a survey of real job seekers, and an experiment with 500 Americans who were looking for work.
Together they found that a company's conduct towards the outside world makes it attractive under one condition: the company also invests in its own people (not that surprising, right?).
With high internal investment, the effect is clear. With low internal investment, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero. The mechanism the authors identify is authenticity. The candidate reads how you treat your employees to decide whether to believe the rest.
Other studies fill in what happens when belief breaks. In an online experiment (Robertson), a misleading environmental claim produced more cynicism among job seekers than no claim at all; but a claim verified by an independent third party avoided the damage. In two experiments with job seekers (Antonetti), a responsibility scandal cut a company's attractiveness by over half a point on a seven-point scale. Except when the company dominated its market. Then the loss was a quarter of a point, almost nothing, and the more the candidate wanted into that industry, the more they forgave. So, being on top of your field seems to matter more than your reputation.
One caution on all of this. The companies in these experiments were fictional. No study followed the candidates to see which job they took.
Satisfaction and climate
This is where the effect is biggest in our beloved meta-analysis.
The question is how, and the answer is less flattering than it sounds.
The largest single study I found is Glavas (2016): 15,184 employees of one US professional-services firm, with a strong link between perceived responsibility and engagement.
The engaged employees were the ones who felt they could be themselves at work. Feeling well treated by the company made no difference, and if anything worked against it. And extra hours of volunteering outside the job weakened the link: people like the company doing good, less so when it becomes their unpaid work. Other studies confirm the route: responsibility makes work feel meaningful, and meaning is what raises satisfaction.
Meaning may also have a cost, though a smaller one than it first seems. In a representative sample of US employees (Jasinenko and Steuber), those who saw more purpose in their company generally reported less conflict between work and life, and more wellbeing. But the authors found one narrow route running the other way: when the job becomes the main source of meaning in someone's life, the conflict with everything else grows, and wellbeing drops a little. The more the job means, the more some people may give, past the point where it is good for them (I think sustainability professionals will truly get that one).
Turnover
Here the first thing to say is what nobody has measured. I found no Western study that links real departures to how employees perceived the company. It is not hard to see why nobody has: who leaves and why is confidential information, and tying an exit to a perception, months or years earlier, is a difficult thing to prove. So the research settles for the next best thing, and asks employees whether they intend to leave. Intending and doing are two different things, and this whole section is about the first.
The research about intention to leave has two sides.
On one side, employees who see their company as responsible say they want to leave less. Paruzel finds the link noticeable, across 15 studies; Garrido-Ruso finds it smaller, across ten. Same direction in both, and stronger among managers than among the rest.
On the other side, the effect runs backwards when the values look fake. Among 520 US retail employees (Goswami and Bhaduri), perceiving the company as hypocritical raised the wish to leave, through lost trust. And employees detect that hypocrisy in two places, according to the interviews in the set: the company, and their direct manager.
So communicating values works in both directions. It may improve the wish to stay among the employees who share them, and it may push the same people towards the door if what they see inside contradicts what they were told. Handle with care.
What is the connection with pay?
This is the one place where the effect is measured in money, and the popular version of the story is simple: people accept lower pay to work for a company they believe in.
Two studies, with very different methods, find something like that. Nyborg and Zhang (2013) matched the payroll records of over 100,000 full-time employees in Norway against a ranking of companies by reputation for responsibility. The better the reputation, the lower the pay, by a margin that was both substantial and statistically clear. Burbano (2016) ran experiments in real online labour markets, with workers who did not know they were being studied. Telling them the employer was socially responsible lowered the pay they asked for: by 11% in a large experiment (434 people), and by 44% in a much smaller one (79 people, so take that figure with care).
The reason people accept it is the part I would keep in mind. Hussain and colleagues (2024), across five studies, found that candidates for jobs with social impact lower their demands because asking for more money feels like breaking an unspoken rule: one does not come here for the money. According to the research, fulfilment had nothing to do with it, and the effect appeared only with money, never with flexibility, time off or training. In other words, the discount may be self-censorship, and self-censorship has a way of turning into resentment.
One laboratory experiment with real stakes (Dadon, Villeval and Zultan, 2026) found no discount at all: workers did not accept offers from charitable employers any more readily, and no wage was traded for the donation.
An extra: Social vs environmental
What moves employees more: a company known for its social values, or one known for its environmental ones? Two of the studies already mentioned answer this directly, and they agree.
The first is Paruzel's meta-analysis: It splits the effect by what the company's responsibility is aimed at. Society scores 0.51, its own employees 0.49, profit 0.48. The planet scores 0.41. Of the four, environmental action, while still relevant, is the one employees respond to least.
Responsibility aimed at | Strength of the link |
|---|---|
Society | 0.51 |
Its own employees | 0.49 |
Profit | 0.48 |
The planet | 0.41 |
The second is Glavas and Kelley, a study of 827 employees across 18 food and agriculture companies in North America, measured at two points in time. It asks a more precise question: once you account for how responsible the company looks overall, does social action add anything on top? Does environmental action? Social action does add something. Environmental action adds nothing. Their explanation is that social action has a person on the other end, and environmental action doesn't.
Conclusion
So the effect exists. It is not the same for everyone, and it is not the same for every kind of value. There is something to gain here, and there is also something to lose if the values you communicate are not the ones people find inside.
What I have not done yet is put a number on it. What is a motivated employee worth, in money? What does belonging save you? How much does a point of turnover actually cost? That is the interesting part for a business case, and that is for another day.
What we have learned
01 Employees who see their company as responsible report better attitudes towards it — on every outcome the research has measured.
02 Almost everything we know comes from asking employees, and the same person usually answers for both the company's conduct and their own reaction.
03 A company's conduct towards the outside world only makes it attractive to candidates if it also invests in its own people.
04 When employees see a gap between what the company says and what it does, they want to leave more, and the reason is lost trust.
05 Responsibility works on employees by making their work feel meaningful.
06 Purpose is good for employees, until the job becomes the main source of meaning in their life; then it starts to cost them.
07 Managers respond more strongly than the rest of the workforce.
08 A company that dominates its market is largely forgiven for behaving irresponsibly.
What I would do
1. Start with how you treat your own people, and check that they feel it. This comes before everything else. The research is clear that an employee who does not feel cared for will not be moved by anything else the company does, however good it is. So before you invest in new initiatives, or in communicating the ones you have, find out where you stand: a climate survey, or whatever internal channel you already trust. That answer tells you whether the rest of your budget will land or be wasted.
2. Connect what you do to the business, and to the job each person does. The effect seems to be stronger when employees feel their own work means something, and scattered good deeds do not get you there. A programme that sits next to the business, in its own corner, stays in its own corner. One that runs through the core of what the company sells, and reaches the work people do every day, is the one employees recognise as theirs. When you can choose between the two, choose the second.
3. Say only what you can back with facts. Values that are not believed do more damage than no values at all. When employees sense a gap between the message and what they see around them, what they feel is hypocrisy, and that pushes them towards the door. So before you publish a value, check what you can show to prove it. "We are all family here" costs nothing to write and is read as empty by anyone whose experience says otherwise. Employees know what the company is actually like, and they will not forget the gap.
4. If you are presenting both, lead with the social. Employees seem to respond a little more to what the company does for people than to what it does for the planet. The gap is not large, and this is no reason to do less on the environment. But when you have both to present and you have to choose an order, start with the social one.
Previously in Premium Sustainability Research: Does the consumer pay more for sustainable products?
It's been a pleasure to share this reading time with you. If you'd like me to let you know when the next article is out, you can subscribe here.
Acknowledgements
Some of the studies in this article were not openly available, and I could read them in full only because their authors shared them with me. My thanks to Karine Nyborg (University of Oslo), Vanessa Burbano (Columbia Business School) and Ante Glavas (SKEMA Business School).
References
Antonetti, P., Crisafulli, B., & Tuncdogan, A. (2021). “Just Look the Other Way”: Job Seekers’ Reactions to the Irresponsibility of Market-Dominant Employers. Journal of Business Ethics, 174(2), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04623-0
Burbano, V. C. (2016). Social Responsibility Messages and Worker Wage Requirements: Field Experimental Evidence from Online Labor Marketplaces. Organization Science, 27(4), 1010–1028. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2016.1066
Dadon, E., Villeval, M. C., & Zultan, R. (2026). Corporate social responsibility as a signal in the labor market. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 241, Article 107384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107384
Garrido-Ruso, M., & Aibar-Guzmán, B. (2022). The moderating effect of contextual factors and employees' demographic features on the relationship between CSR and work-related attitudes: A meta-analysis. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 29(5), 1839–1854. https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.2331
Glavas, A. (2016). Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Engagement: Enabling Employees to Employ More of Their Whole Selves at Work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 796. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00796
Glavas, A., & Kelley, K. (2014). The Effects of Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility on Employee Attitudes. Business Ethics Quarterly, 24(2), 165–202. https://doi.org/10.5840/beq20143206
Goswami, S., & Bhaduri, G. (2021). Investigating the direct and indirect effects of perceived corporate hypocrisy on turnover intentions. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 12(3), 214–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/20932685.2021.1893782
Goswami, S., & Ha-Brookshire, J. E. (2016). Exploring U.S. Retail Employees’ Experiences of Corporate Hypocrisy. Organization Management Journal, 13(3), 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/15416518.2016.1214064
Hussain, I., Pitesa, M., Thau, S., & Schaerer, M. (2024). Pay Suppression in Social Impact Contexts: How Framing Work Around the Greater Good Inhibits Job Candidate Compensation Demands. Organization Science, 35(2), 525–549. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1675
Jasinenko, A., & Steuber, J. (2023). Perceived Organizational Purpose: Systematic Literature Review, Construct Definition, Measurement and Potential Employee Outcomes. Journal of Management Studies, 60(6), 1415–1447. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12852
Nyborg, K., & Zhang, T. (2013). Is Corporate Social Responsibility Associated with Lower Wages? Environmental and Resource Economics, 55(1), 107–117. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-012-9617-8
Ong, M., Kim, Y. H., & Koopman, J. (2024). Help yourself before helping others: When corporate social responsibility does not make a company more attractive to job seekers. Personnel Psychology, 77(3), 1267–1297. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12633
Paruzel, A., Klug, H. J. P., & Maier, G. W. (2021). The Relationship Between Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 607108. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.607108
Robertson, J. L., Karamally, T., Simpson, B., & Montgomery, A. W. (2025). Understanding the Effects of Corporate Environmental Communication on Jobseekers. Business Strategy and the Environment, 34(8), 9844–9862. https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.70094
Other studies reviewed
Part of the 30 studies behind this article, not cited in the text.
Aguinis, H., & Glavas, A. (2012). What We Know and Don’t Know About Corporate Social Responsibility. Journal of Management, 38(4), 932–968. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311436079
Aguinis, H., & Glavas, A. (2013). Embedded Versus Peripheral Corporate Social Responsibility: Psychological Foundations. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 6(4), 314–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/iops.12059
Aguinis, H., & Glavas, A. (2019). On Corporate Social Responsibility, Sensemaking, and the Search for Meaningfulness Through Work. Journal of Management, 45(3), 1057–1086. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206317691575
Aguinis, H., Rupp, D. E., & Glavas, A. (2024). Corporate social responsibility and individual behaviour. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(2), 219–227. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01802-7
Buhai, I. S., Cottini, E., & Westergaard-Nielsen, N. (2017). How Productive Is Workplace Health and Safety? Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 119(4), 1086–1104. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12184
Florek-Paszkowska, A., & Hoyos-Vallejo, C. A. (2023). Going green to keep talent: Exploring the relationship between sustainable business practices and turnover intention. Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, 19(3), 87–128. https://doi.org/10.7341/20231933
Glavas, A. (2016). Corporate Social Responsibility and Organizational Psychology: An Integrative Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 144. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00144
Glavas, A., & Godwin, L. N. (2013). Is the Perception of ‘Goodness’ Good Enough? Exploring the Relationship Between Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Organizational Identification. Journal of Business Ethics, 114(1), 15–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1323-5
Glavas, A., & Piderit, S. K. (2009). How Does Doing Good Matter? Effects of Corporate Citizenship on Employees. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 36, 51–70.
Hahn, T., Sharma, G., & Glavas, A. (2024). Employee-CSR Tensions: Drivers of Employee (Dis)Engagement with Contested CSR Initiatives. Journal of Management Studies, 61(4), 1364–1392. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12923
Ibáñez, M. J., & Huamán, J. (2021). Corporate Social Responsibility and Justice in the Salary Structure: Practice or Symbolism? International Business & Economics Studies, 3(2), 94–106. https://doi.org/10.22158/ibes.v3n2p94
Katz, I. M., Rauvola, R. S., Rudolph, C. W., & Zacher, H. (2022). Employee green behavior: A meta-analysis. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 29(5), 1146–1157. https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.2260
Keskin, H., Tatoglu, E., Akgün, A. E., Esen, E., & Salt, E. (2025). Employee Green Values and Perceived Greenwashing: The Mediating Role of Person-Organization Fit in CSR-Oriented Companies. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 32(4), 4861–4879. https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.3219
Lin, Z., Gu, H., Gillani, K. Z., & Fahlevi, M. (2024). Impact of Green Work–Life Balance and Green Human Resource Management Practices on Corporate Sustainability Performance and Employee Retention: Mediation of Green Innovation and Organisational Culture. Sustainability, 16(15), 6621. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16156621
Nyborg, K. (2014). Do responsible employers attract responsible employees? IZA World of Labor, Article 17. https://doi.org/10.15185/izawol.17
Zhang, M., Černe, M., Samimi Dehkordi, S., Scaringella, L., & Scaringella, M. (2026). Corporate Social Responsibility as a Stakeholder Signal: Fairness and Belonging as Pathways to Job Satisfaction and Commitment. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.70688