The Mirror Within: How Employee Perceptions of CSR Practices Shape Corporate Image Across Ghana's Energy, Telecommunications, and Transport Sectors
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63772/jocmas.v11n1.6Keywords:
Perceptions, Employee Relations, CSR Communication, Corporate Social Responsibility PracticesAbstract
Employee stakeholders offer a theoretically critical yet underexplored lens for understanding how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) shapes corporate image. While the CSR literature has predominantly examined external stakeholder perceptions, employees — whose daily behaviour either confirms or contradicts an organisation’s social responsibility claims — have received insufficient empirical attention in Ghana. This study evaluates employee CSR perceptions across Ghana’s Energy, Telecommunications, and Transport sectors, examining their differential effects on corporate image. Adopting a quantitative cross-sectional survey design underpinned by Stakeholder Theory and Person-Organisation Fit Theory, the study sampled 50 employees from the Volta River Authority (VRA), MTN Ghana, and the Centre for Transport Security Dialogue (CETSED). One-sample t-tests, one-way ANOVA with Tukey HSD post hoc tests, and linear regression were conducted in SPSS version 20. Four principal findings emerge. First, employees hold significantly positive CSR perceptions across all dimensions, with CSR towards society the strongest (M = 4.072) and CSR towards employees the weakest (M = 3.636). Second, ANOVA reveals significant sector differences, with Energy and Telecommunications employees reporting higher scores than Transport employees. Third, no significant sectoral difference in corporate image was found. Fourth, regression confirms that CSR towards employees, customers, government, and the environment each positively predict corporate image, while CSR towards society — the strongest-perceived dimension — produces no significant image effect. This societal paradox reveals that employees recognise societal CSR without converting it into enhanced image perceptions. The study proposes a Stakeholder-Differentiated CSR Image Model and recommends rebalancing CSR portfolios towards employee-directed and customer-directed initiatives to maximise image returns.
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