In order to develop sustainable business strategies to tackle grand societal challenges, it is essential to understand how society perceives the role of business firms in this context and what it demands for the future.
Anna Jasinenko is an Assistant Professor (tenure track) of Organizational Behavior at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in management from the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management and a Master’s degree in psychology from the University of Vienna (both with the highest distinctions). Her dissertation titled “Public Value: Opportunities and Challenges to Capture the Organizational Contribution to the Common Good” received the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation’s Best Dissertation Award 2022.
In her research, Dr. Jasinenko applies a social evaluation lens to conceptualize, measure, and manage organizational approaches to contribute to the common good. Thereby, she examines the micro-foundations of responsible and sustainable business practices, such as organizational purpose, public value and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Moreover, she researches how individual sustainability competencies, such as the Inner Development Goals, can be developed. Her work was published in top-tier peer-reviewed academic journals, such as the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Business Ethics, or the Journal of Management.
This research stream examines how institutional environments such as regulation, societal crises, and ecological conditions shape sustainability- and responsibility-related attitudes, legitimacy judgments, and corporate practices at the micro and organizational levels. At the same time, we study how individual and collective interpretations, evaluations, and actions feed back into these institutional contexts at the macro level by reinforcing, transforming, or contesting them over time. Together, this perspective captures the dynamic two-way relationship between macro-level institutions and the micro-level foundations of responsible business behavior.
The Role of Organizational Purpose
The second research stream focuses on organizational purpose, understood as an overarching organizational goal that goes beyond profit maximization and articulates how an organization seeks to contribute to society. It focuses on internally driven initiatives through which organizations define and enact responsibility. This stream builds on my publication in the Journal of Management Studies on the micro-foundations of organizational purpose, which shows that purpose only translates into positive organizational and societal outcomes when it is genuinely perceived, internalized, and lived by organizational members. Hence, we examine how purpose is interpreted, negotiated, and enacted within organizations rather than treating purpose as a symbolic statement. Building on this foundation, the stream develops a broader research program that connects individual sensemaking, stakeholder evaluations, and organizational-level purpose implementation to questions of legitimacy, authenticity, and long-term societal impact.
Steven A. Brieger, Anna Jasinenko, and Javad Ghaffari Feyzabadi
This study contributes to research on organizational environmental sustainability by offering a bio-ecological explanation for persistent heterogeneity in firms’ sustainability practices. Specifically, we introduce pathogen stress as a previously overlooked antecedent of firms’ environmental sustainability engagement. Adopting a micro-foundational perspective, we further show that pathogen stress shapes individual-level relational orientations and temporal focus, which jointly mediate its effect on firm-level sustainability outcomes. By unpacking these psychological mechanisms, our study explains how bio-ecological conditions influence sustainability engagement and highlights theoretically meaningful levers for sustaining environmental initiatives even in high-pathogen stress contexts.
Anna Jasinenko, Steven A. Brieger, and Patrick Haack
The institutional perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has discussed two diametrically opposed hypotheses about how institutional context influences CSR. Whereas the mirror hypothesis suggests that CSR is stronger in institutional contexts with stringent CSR-related regulations, the substitute hypothesis posits that CSR is stronger in weakly regulated contexts. Drawing on the micro-CSR literature, we propose that examining individual CSR motivation can help to better understand the effect of institutional context on CSR because it makes focusing on substantively motivated CSR possible, and it can shed light on the hitherto neglected psychological moderators in this relationship.
Anna Jasinenko & Josephina Steuber
An increasing number of managers and scholars agree that organizations need to have a purpose that goes beyond pure profit maximization. But what exactly represents a higher organizational purpose? How can we measure it? And how will it affect the organization’s employees?
Anna Jasinenko, Fabian Christandl, and Timo Meynhardt
Can individuals’ political ideology predict how they judge CSR and respond to it? If conservatives versus liberals differ in their CSR responses, why is this the case?
Timo Meynhardt and Anna Jasinenko
The public value concept is highly popular among practitioners and researchers, yet, to further test and develop the construct it needs more diversity in empirical research. We aim to contribute to future empirical public value research by providing a new public value scale based on Meynhardt’s conceptualization of public value.
Timo Meynhardt, Anna Jasinenko, and Thorben Grubert
The Common Good Balance Sheet is an instrument to measure a company’s contribution to the common good. Based on a representative empirical survey in Germany, we approach the question of democratic legitimacy of the common good conceptualization of this balance sheet.
Autorenlinie und Veröffentlichung in Journal XY
Will the Covid-19 pandemic change peoples’ opinions about business responsibility? If this continues, the pandemic might break old routines and ultimately generate new ways of thinking.
Autorenlinie und Veröffentlichung in Journal XY
Co-authors Nulla vel sodales tellus, quis condimentum enim. Nunc porttitor venenatis feugiat. Etiam quis faucibus erat, non accumsan leo. Aliquam erat volutpat. Vestibulum ac faucibus eros. Cras ullamcorper gravida tellus ut consequat.
Anna Jasinenko, Patrick Haack, and Derek Harmon
Will the Covid-19 pandemic change peoples’ opinions about business responsibility? If this continues, the pandemic might break old routines and ultimately generate new ways of thinking.
Recent media articles that referred to my work.
