Despite the recurrence of scandals such as ‘diesel-gate’ bringing the focus into employee social responsibility (ESR) time and again, serious research into ESR has started only recently. Since there are considerable divergences in its conceptualization, I first attempt to bring clarity to the construct by laying its theoretical foundations by extrapolating Kohlbergian and neo-Kohlbergian moral theories to the social responsibility domain. Having defined the construct, through empirical research I then proceed to accomplish two broad objectives. First, in causal research, I investigate how business goal difficulty (BGD) impacts ESR mediated through a cognitive bias called focalism. Even though recent studies have indicated that difficult goals can lead to explicit cheating behaviour, the investigation into the impact of goal difficulty through focalism’s implicit mechanism on socially responsible behaviour has not yet been attempted. Across three experimental studies, I establish that BGD predicts focalism, which in turn mediates the negative relationship between BGD and ESR. My investigation further suggests that focalism is a powerful bias, not easily attenuated by contextual and dispositional moderators, specifically, ethical leadership behaviours of supervisors and reflective moral attentiveness of employees. Theoretical and practical implications of this causal research are discussed. In the second part of my empirical research, I develop the ESR scale as a superordinate multidimensional measure incorporating the dimensions of concern orientation, norms adherence orientation, sociocentric orientation, and perseverance. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on multiple employee samples across several organizations and two countries corroborate the hypothesized factor structure. The second-order multidimensional ESR scale demonstrated good reliability and validity. The ESR scale exhibited configural and metric invariance between English (India) and German versions. The predictive validity of the ESR scale is also established by testing the hypothesized relationships between paternalistic leadership dimensions and ESR through structural equation modeling. The theoretical and managerial applications of ESR scale are discussed.