8. Employer Branding and Employee-Emotional Bonding—The CSR Way to Sustainable HRM

The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has come of age as it has evolved itself into a state and practice of permanency in every organization with its potential to affect both internal and external business environment. By its inevitable nature in today’s corporate scenario, CSR acquired such strategic importance for business that no company worth its name can afford to ignore it, and thus, should sincerely integrate their CSR, aimed at both internal and external stakeholders, into its business strategy. For this fact and analogy, the employee, being the most important internal stakeholder for every business enterprise, needs to be paid extraordinary attention by the employer to strengthen the emotional bond between the two as the success of an organization largely depends on conducive work environment resulting from favorable employer–employee relations. The practice of CSR has the potential to affirmatively affect the employer branding (EB)—the power to pull the desired talent and employee-emotional bonding (EeB)—the strength of employer–employee relationship, through various internal and external initiatives, and in turn, helps to achieve sustainable human resource management (S-HRM). Though there is an abundance of research available on the role and importance of HR in CSR or impact of CSR on HR through employee engagement, etc., yet, there is marked dearth of literature on the interconnect between CSR and EB to understand EeB with the organization through the perspective of S-HRM. Thus, this paper comprehends the synthesis between CSR oriented EB, EeB, and S-HRM. The study shall help the researchers in conceptualizing various approaches and viewpoints of S-HRM into a model which is integrated internally and externally.