Feeling Good About Doing Good: How the Perceived Authenticity of Organizational Social Responsibility Impacts Affective Organizational Commitment of Local Government Employees

Although cognitive evaluations of organizational practices are considered important predictors of employees’ work-related attitudes, insights into how these attributions impact affective organizational commitment remain limited. Drawing on attribution theory and the first- and third-party effect framework, this study examines in municipalities how public sector employees’ perceptions of the authenticity of organizational social responsibility are related to their affective organizational commitment. We use structural equation modeling with cluster-corrected standard errors to analyze survey responses from 852 employees across 41 Belgian municipalities and test our conceptual model. The results, consistent with the hypotheses, reveal that public sector employees’ perceptions of the authenticity of the municipality’s social responsibility are positively related to their perceptions of societal impact potential and the organizational support they believe they receive. These evaluative perceptions, in turn, are positively associated with meaningful work, which is a key driver of affective organizational commitment.