Does Ethical CSR Buffer the Creativity Cost of Cyberbullying?

Abstract

Cyberbullying in the workplace has emerged as a growing concern within higher education institutions (HEIs) across Europe. Drawing on COR theory and micro-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature, it develops a moderated mediation framework in which workplace cyberbullying undermines academic creative behaviour by depleting psychological well-being, and employee-oriented CSR attenuates both the direct and indirect effects of this process. COR theory explains why cyberbullying depletes the psychological resources creativity requires; CSR literature supplies the specific organisational resource, a "resource caravan," in Hobfoll's terms that COR theory predicts should buffer this depletion, a pairing not previously made in the cyberbullying-creativity literature. The framework extends resource-based creativity research to an occupational group not yet examined under this lens, and specifies a dual-level buffering mechanism not yet tested jointly elsewhere. We propose European HEIs as the empirical scope for future testing, given the increasing digitalisation of academic work across the continent. The framework carries practical implications for how HEIs design cyberbullying policy, monitor staff well-being, and embed employee-oriented CSR into institutional culture as a safeguard for sustained academic creativity.