I feel morally elevated by my organization’s CSR, so I contribute to it

•Empirically supports that employees care about CSR for moral/deontic reasons.•CSR toward a secondary stakeholder leads to moral elevation among employees.•Collectivistic organizational identity orientation strengthens this relationship.•Moral elevation leads to behavior supporting CSR toward this secondary stakeholder. While research addressing the micro-foundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has often built on the deontic theory of justice to explain why employees care about their organization’s CSR, the mechanisms underlying this deontic path have seldom been examined. Therefore, we study moral elevation, an other-directed moral emotion that, according to deontic theory of justice, could help us understand why employees may react positively to their organization’s CSR even when it does not offer employees significant self-centered benefits. We advance that moral elevation substantiates the deontic mechanism put forward to explain why CSR translates into employees’ behavior supporting this CSR. We carry out an experiment and a survey that provide support for this hypothesis. By identifying moral elevation as a mechanism underlying the deontic path, our research provides empirical support for the deontic argument in micro-CSR research that employees care about CSR because CSR is the moral thing to do.