Investigation the Links between Authentic Leadership and Employee & Customer Value Co-Creation: the Mediating Role of Corporate Social Responsibility and the Moderating Role of Authenticity.

This study will investigate how authentic leadership promotes employee and customer value co-creation via key mediators: corporate social responsibility (CSR). And what the role of authenticity evaluation plays in this process? By integrating past literatures of scholars, a three-level framework which includes the organization, employee and customer levels was developed in a systematic way, to explore “how authentic leadership promotes employee value co-creation (EVCC) via key mediator of CSR, and the employee perceptions of authenticity as a moderator role between CSR and EVCC” as well as “how EVCC promotes customer value co-creation (CVCC) via key mediator of CSR, and the customer authenticity evaluation as moderator role between CSR and CVCC.” Hierarchical linear model (HLM) will be conducted to analyze the cross-level model in this study. A total of 1500 questionnaires will be distributed to 166 enterprises implementing CSR in Taiwan.In order to investigate the relationship between authentic leadership and customer behavior comprehensively, we will divide our research into two parts. First, we will examine the mediating effect of organizational CSR in the relationship between organizational-level authentic leadership and employee-level EVCC. We will also examine the moderation effect of employee perceptions of authenticity in the relationship between organizational-level CSR and employee-level EVCC. Second, we will examine the mediating effect of customer-level CSR in the relationship between employee-level EVCC and customer-level CVCC.Besides, the moderation effect of customer authenticity evaluation between customer-level CSR and CVCC will be identified.This study will contribute to the field of research in four aspects. First, this study will address a gap in the empirical literature by examining the positive impact of authentic leadership on EVCC and identified CSR as a meditation factor for more in-depth discussion of the value of CSR between leader and employee relations. Second, this study will provide the influence of interaction effect of the employee perceptions of authenticity to explore how CSR promote EVCC. Third, this study will highlight the importance of CSR on the relationship between employee and customer. The study will also identify that CSR is also a key factor affecting the CVCC not just the behavior of employees will affect the CVCC. Forth, this study will investigate the interaction effect of the customer authenticity evaluation between CSR and CVCC. Fifth, HLM will be conducted to investigate the mediation and moderation effects on the cross-level relationships among organization, employee and customer. This methodology provided a more comprehensive perspective in the research field of CSR compared to single-level analysis.