Firms are increasingly drawing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in their employer branding to improve attractiveness and engage current and potential employees, and to ensure consistency in employee brand behaviours. However, there is a dearth of literature synthesising CSR and employer branding research to understand employee engagement with CSR-firms from a branding perspective. In this article, the authors carried out an integrative literature review of CSR and employer branding literatures. Informed by signaling theory, the authors develop a conceptual model of the CSR employer branding process as a cohesive view from the potential and current employee perspective. Our review highlights the need for firms to achieve CSR consistency in terms of (a) embeddedness of CSR values, and (b) levels of internal CSR. These two factors frame a typology that enable managers to better execute their CSR employer brand identity to achieve favourable results, such as a high-quality talent pool and positive affective, cognitive and behavioural employee outcomes.

With corporate social responsibility (CSR) becoming increasingly important, this research forms a nexus for strategic CSR and internal brand knowledge through the conceptual development and empirical validation of a model. The research methodology is based on an online survey administered via a temporal data collection approach (i.e. two-wave). The findings substantiate that internal branding constructs that characterise the employees internal CSR experienced. The internal CSR experience is also shaped by individual factors, such as employee awareness of CSR, perception of the sincerity of the CSR brand and subjective knowledge of CSR. The findings demonstrate the precedential effect of the internal branding constructs on employee performance outcomes (CSR involvement, organisational attachment and organisational citizenship behaviours). The integrity of the model is substantiated by partial least squares (PLS) testing. The study provides scholars and practitioners with empirical evidence of CSR as an internal branding tool to improve brand alignment and employee performance.

Given the rising global use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by professional sport organisations, this paper acts to consolidate the state of scholarly research using a systematic quantitative literature review. Our aim was to critically analyse the literature on CSR and professional sport organisations and in doing so ask, how is the global research at the nexus of sport and CSR poised to deliver social good? Our findings indicate the presence of variability in approaches to investigating CSR in professional sport, and the lack of discrete reporting of target audiences and initiatives evidenced across our sample. We suggest there is potential to learn from other disciplinary approaches to CSR research and to push towards conceptual clarity. Finally, sport organisations can lever sports’ unique qualities to deliver, engage and unite people across a range of boundaries, and to promote and create social value which is even more important as we navigate the post-COVID-19 environment of uncertainty and resource constraints.