“When Corporate Social Responsibility Backfires: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment”, John A. List, Fatemeh Momeni2020-06-08 (economics)⁠:

This paper uses a natural field experiment to connect corporate social responsibility (CSR) to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking.

Through employing more than 1,500 workers, we find that our use of CSR increases employee misbehavior—24% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duties when we introduce CSR.

Observed data patterns across the treatments are consonant with a model of “moral licensing”, whereby the “doing good” nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that is harmful to the firm.