Prosocial identity and participation in corporate volunteering: Unraveling their temporal relationships and considering the role of prosocial impact of the volunteering program

Previous studies suggest a vicious cycle between prosocial identity and participation in volunteering activities. However, evidence for such a conclusion mainly comes from mixed types of volunteering activities using crosssectional designs. We still lack an understanding of the causal associations between employees’ prosocial identity and their participation in volunteering activities sponsored by their own firms, let alone their temporal relationships over time. To address this gap, we employed an extended bivariate latent difference score approach to unravel their dynamic relationships over time. Findings from 311 employees from a three-wave longitudinal design showed that employees’ decrease in prosocial identity will generate their further decrease in participation in corporate volunteering programs while the reverse effect is contingent on whether the volunteering program has some prosocial impact. In other words, impactful programs attenuate the effects in a way that employees’ decrease in prosocial identity is alleviated when they participate in a more prosocial and impactful corporate volunteering programs compared to those less prosocial and impactful.