Search results

Despite the intensive research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm financial performance, little is known about how the linkage between CSR and firm financial performance is heterogeneous across industries and how the performance implications are differentiated among specific categories of CSR activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the association between a firm’s engagement in CSR and firm financial performance is heterogeneous across industries and CSR categories.

Using a sample of 17,083 firm-year observations representing 1,877 firms from the largest 3,000 US companies during years 1991 and 2011, the authors compare the association between CSR and firm financial performance across ten industry sectors defined by Global Industry Classification Standard and across the four CSR categories classified by Mandl and Dorr (2007).

The authors find that the association between the overall CSR activities and firm performance is heterogeneous across industries. CSR has significant positive implications for firms from most, but not all, industries. Comparing the performance implication of CSR practices targeting different stakeholder groups, the empirical results indicate that different types of CSR have different influences on financial performance of firms from different industry sectors.

This study provides new angles for managers in maximizing firm performance through CSR activities and suggests an important and interesting direction for researchers who engage in CSR research. Due to its heterogeneous nature, the CSR-performance relationship needs to be examined more specifically – across industries and different CSR categories. Findings from studies incorporating both company industrial sector and CSR categories would provide more meaningful and practical implications for managers.

This study provides important managerial implications. First, to maximize firm performance through CSR activities, managers must interpret the linkage between CSR and firm financial performance from the perspective of a specific industrial sector and acknowledge the importance of CSR practices across different CSR categories. Second, the findings suggest that CSR practices aiming at different stakeholder groups generate different financial returns in different industries. Firms engage in CSR to satisfy different stakeholder groups. When budgets are tight, managers may give higher priority to the CSR practices that have stronger effects on firm financial performance.

This study advances our understanding of the CSR-financial performance relationship by exploring its heterogeneous nature across industry sectors and across specific categories. To obtain the biggest gain from CSR spending, managers must have a good understanding how a specific CSR category can contribute to the financial performance of their particular company in their particular industry.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance is critical to address construction activities’ environmental and social impacts. This study aims to evaluate the level of CSR implementation across various categories within the context of the Vietnamese construction industry.

The literature review and semi-structured interviews were conducted to determine Vietnamese construction organizations’ most commonly implemented CSR activities. A total of 252 valid responses were then obtained through a questionnaire survey. In addition, the fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) method was used to evaluate the extent to which CSR categories have been implemented in construction companies.

The findings revealed 31 commonly implemented CSR activities of the Vietnamese construction firms, which were grouped into four categories. Of the four categories, the FSE analysis showed that stakeholder CSR was the most critical category, followed by ethical CSR, philanthropic CSR and environmental CSR.

This research provides valuable CSR activities to construction companies that intend to develop sustainably. Moreover, the proposed prioritization methodology offers practitioners a reliable and easy-to-use evaluation tool that clearly understands CSR performance within their organizations.

This paper aims to report on the quality of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in S&P Europe 350 companies. The paper also examines the impact of corporate governance structure and other firm-specific characteristics on the quality of CSR disclosure in European companies.

The paper uses a disclosure index adopted from Jizi et al. (2014). Moreover, the paper contributes to the CSR disclosure literature by developing a new index that includes all the aspects introduced by the Global Reporting Initiative version 4.The data of CSR reporting are manually collected from the firms’ reports. The population and sample of this study are related to 350 companies operating in 16 European countries. Tobit regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that directors’ ownership, the presence of a CSR committee and firm size positively affect the quality of CSR reporting. Further testing of the independent variables on each CSR sub-category is made. The CSR sub-categories used are, namely, community involvement, employees, environment, social product and service quality, supply chain sustainability and business ethics. The presence of a sustainability committee inside the company is the only factor that shows a strong positive effect on the disclosure of every CSR sub-category and the CSR inclusive index.

The limitations of this research are that it focuses exclusively on the effect of the internal corporate mechanisms on the quality of CSR reporting; disregarding the economic, institutional, political and cultural factors that can play a role in influencing sustainability reporting of the companies.

Better CSR disclosure leads to the firm having a better image in the society; this, in turn, has implications on firm performance, attracting funds, as well as recruiting and retaining high profile employees. Stakeholders are placing cumulative significance to corporate transparency particularly in the area of CSR. Managers should exert more efforts into not only improving the disclosure of the various facts of CSR but also into using the various media available for disclosure. Companies should take the initiative of establishing a CSR committee to ensure effective formation and implementation of CSR policies and disclosure of CSR activities.

The CRS research itself bears the merit of social implications. Moreover, the findings of this research pave the way for future researches to examine the effect of the adoption of global CSR initiatives and frameworks on the quality of CSR reporting.

This paper contributes to the CSR disclosure literature by developing a new index that includes all the aspects of CSR and exploring the relation between the rarely explored “presence of sustainability committee” and CSR disclosure, as well as testing a vast number of CSR sub-categories that is not extensively covered in previous studies. Moreover, the paper covers a large sample of companies across 16 European countries, in terms of their stand-alone sustainability reports, dedicated chapters of CSR in annual reports, integrated reports, website CSR information and any attachments/links provided on the websites for further CSR documents, brochures or data sheets.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure on the financial performance of Islamic banks across nine countries as major markets that contribute to international Islamic bank assets (Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Bahrain and Pakistan or further will be called QISMUT + 3 countries).

Islamic Social Reporting Disclosure Index (ISRDI) is being used as a benchmark for Islamic bank CSR performance that contains a compilation of CSR standard items specified by the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions. The secondary data is collected from the respective bank’s annual reports and it used the regression analysis techniques for statistical testing.

This study found that CSR disclosure measured by ISRDI has a positive effect on financial performance. Almost all ISRDI sub-major categories have a positive effect on financial performance except the “environment” subcategory. The highest major subcategory for ISRDI is the “corporate governance” category (82%) and the “environment” category (13%) is the lowest. For the UAE, Kuwait and Turkey, the ISRDI is positively affected by financial performance and the other countries on this research are not.

This study highlighted the economic benefits of social responsibility practices as a part of business ethics in nine countries that uphold the value of religiosity. Thus, the development of the results of this research for subsequent research is very wide open.

The purpose of this paper is to explore CEO corporate social responsibility (CSR) rhetorical choices in response to stakeholder pressures. CEOs often search for legitimacy through CSR rhetoric. It contributes to maintaining or developing pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy in a post‐crisis world where CSR concerns are gaining in importance.

A content analysis of various CEO discourses is performed. Press articles are analyzed to identify the nature of stakeholder pressures. Covariance analyses are conducted to study how CEO CSR rhetorical strategies vary between communication channels dedicated to specific stakeholders. Regression analyses are conducted between stakeholder pressures and rhetorical strategies.

The paper identifies three types of CEO CSR rhetorical categories: values rhetoric to develop moral legitimacy, normative rhetoric to improve cognitive legitimacy, and instrumental rhetoric to enhance pragmatic legitimacy. Values CSR rhetoric is used most often with employees or societal stakeholders. It increases when stakeholders' satisfaction is already quite high regarding financial performance, strategy, and products and services. Normative CSR rhetoric is rarely used. It is only devoted to societal stakeholders and it increases with stakeholder satisfaction with the quality of management, leadership and governance. Instrumental CSR rhetoric is mainly used with boards of directors, financial investors and shareholders. Its importance increases with stakeholder satisfaction with CSR but decreases with stakeholder satisfaction with financial performance and corporate vision/strategy.

The paper provides key contributions for CEOs on how to communicate on CSR. The empirical design based on qualitative and quantitative analyses innovates in operationalizing CSR rhetorical categories and stakeholder pressures.

This paper aims to examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firm performance (FP) of companies listed on the Tunis Stock Exchange.

This paper reports on two empirical studies. The first was an exploratory qualitative study carried out on a sample of 30 Tunisian companies operating in different sectors. The second empirical study used a panel data regression analysis, to examine data from 46 companies listed on the Tunis Stock Exchange during the 2017 to 2021 period.

The results of the exploratory qualitative study pointed out the specificities of the Tunisian context as to the importance of CSR. The results highlighted also the importance of the 2018 CSR law in Tunisia, yet it drew attention to the non-implementation of its applying texts, meaning that CSR is not always enforced in the Tunisian context. Moreover, in this qualitative study, most companies confirmed that CSR is a key factor behind good governance practices. By studying the impact of CSR on various FP proxies, the results highlight that CSR has a positive and significant impact on FP measured by ROA as an accounting variable and stock returns as a market-measure variable. In addition, the authors confirm the moderating effect of innovation on the CSR and FP relationship. Indeed, innovation affects corporate FP differently. It hinders accounting-based FP while fostering the market-based one.

The study provides insights for managers into how CSR approaches can be used to maximize profits, improve its FP and reputation, while considering the corporate innovative capacities. CSR is a real performance lever for companies, a means of improving their economic, environmental and social efficiency. It enables companies to anticipate constraints and prevent risks, reduce certain operational costs, optimize resources, communicate a good image and stand out from the competition, gain easier access to innovation, strengthen their competitive edge, gain easier access to financing and strengthen their territorial and social roots.

The main contribution of this paper is the adoption of two empirical approaches. These two methods are complementary. The first is an exploratory qualitative approach aimed at better understanding the current state of CSR implementation by Tunisian companies. The second one is quantitative, a panel data regression analysis. Furthermore, the authors test the moderating effect of innovation on the studied link. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the moderating effect of innovation on CSR FP in the Tunisian context. Finally, robustness tests were conducted to test the reliability of this study’s results.

In 2014, the European Union (EU) adopted the non-financial reporting Directive (2014/95/EU) making the disclosure of certain non-financial topics mandatory for large listed companies. They are required to report on policies, actions and outcomes regarding their environmental impact, social and employee matters, impact on human rights and corruption. Denmark introduced mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting already in 2009, while Germany had no specific legislation on CSR reporting before 2017. Some authors allege that regulation positively impacts CSR reporting, while others argue that the voluntary nature of CSR reporting is essential (Romolini, Fissi, & Gori, 2014). Critics of mandatory reporting claim that non-financial reporting should develop bottom-up, as mandatory one-size-fits-all solutions are inappropriate given the differences among companies (ICC, 2015). The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the effect of legislation on reporting quality by comparing Denmark with a long tradition for mandatory reporting and Germany introducing mandatory rather recently. However, a rich body of literature exists on factors impacting CSR reporting other than legislation. These are among others: firm size, ownership structure, industrial sector and culture (Hahn & Kühnen, 2013.)

The chapter applies a content analysis of 150 CSR reports from German and Danish listed companies between 2008 and 2017 from four different industrial sectors. The chapter finds that mandatory reporting improves overall report quality by lifting the quality floor, yet, without lifting the quality ceiling. Size is important as improvements in reporting are largest in small and medium-sized companies. Companies in environmentally sensitive sectors tend to disclose more relevant environmental information than companies in less sensitive sectors. Both culture and ownership structure has a moderating effect on report quality.

This study aims to investigate employees’ perceptions of socially responsible financial services brands in Saudi Arabia. The study also identifies the motives and challenges for Islamic banks for higher involvement in social responsibility initiatives to enhance their brand values.

An inductive approach was used in this study to identify the motives and challenges related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. The research design uses a qualitative approach where in-depth interviews were carried out among the employees in the financial services sector in Saudi Arabia.

Findings provide insights about how CSR initiatives for financial services brands in a developing and Islamic country are perceived. Results show that the focus of CSR activities is on the attribute of CSR, the magnitude of CSR and attitude towards CSR. Results show two main motives to engage in CSR activities, which are instrumental and ethical motives. The main challenges are related to the government, business, charitable organisations and customers and society.

Implications exist for how CSR is perceived in a new context and in the financial services industry. Understanding the current perception of CSR from a financial service brand perspective helps policymakers to develop appropriate platforms for financial service providers to become more socially involved.

The major contribution of this study lies in investigating the CSR perception among the key stakeholder (i.e. the employees) from a brand management perspective in the Saudi Arabian financial services sector. Further, this study shows the main motives and challenges, which local financial service brands face to become socially responsible. The categories of attributes, magnitude and attitudes can be used to enhance brand value in one of the economically advanced countries in the Arabic world, Saudi Arabia. In the first category “attribute”, the perception of socially responsible banks are highlighted, while the elements of CSR, including its dimensions, are emphasised in the second category “magnitude”. The third category “attitude” shows two themes, including stakeholders’ issues and business-related issues.

The purpose of this research is to explore the impact of women in the C-suite on strategic marketing choices in general and CSR in particular is scant. To that end, this study explores whether and how firms led by female CEOs differ from those led by male CEOs with regard to the types of CSR they pursue. The study classifies CSR into two types: relational (i.e. related to employees, human rights, community and diversity) and rational (i.e. related to product, environment and corporate governance).

To create the sample, the authors combined four databases: Compustat, Execucomp, Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) and Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini and Co., Inc. (KLD). Data for the time period between 1992 and 2013 (both inclusive) were used for the investigation. The final sample comprised of 2,739 firms, for a total of 19,969 firm-year observations (an unbalanced panel).

Building on self-construal theory and theory of female ethics, the authors theorize and find evidence that while firms led by male and female CEOs are not significantly different with regard to rational CSR performance, firms led by female CEOs outperform those led by male CEOs with regard to their relational CSR performance. Furthermore, the authors also find that different types of CEO power (i.e. managerial power, legitimate power and formal power) moderate the link between CEO gender and types of CSR differently.

This research contributes to research on CSR by introducing two new types of CSR: relational CSR and rational CSR. Further, the research contributes to the broader discussion of how senior managers inject their gender roles into their CSR choices. The authors provide important insights in this area by highlighting that at least some types of myopic management are also driven by CEO gender: female CEOs – to the extent that they are more likely to invest in CSR strengths which pay off in the long run – engage in less myopic management than male CEOs with regard to CSR choices.

To prospective managers, this research suggests that the gender of the CEO is an effective signal that can help them predict firms’ likely CSR behavior. More specifically, firms led by female CEOs are likely to outperform those led by male CEOs with regard to certain dimensions of CSR (higher relational and rational strengths and fewer relational concerns) and this effect of CEO gender on firms’ CSR behavior is likely to be more pronounced when the CEO exhibits certain kinds of power. Female CEOs may benefit by understanding their innate tendencies to focus on relational versus rational CSR, thereby taking advantage of the positive aspects of their tendencies.

This paper classifies CSR into two types: relational and rational. The findings indicate the benefits of this nuanced classification: female CEOs have a stronger impact on relational CSR compared to male CEOs, while the two types of CEOs do not show a significant difference with regard to their impact on rational CSR. The paper also shows that dividing the variable of CEO power into its sub-types, i.e. managerial power (CEO duality), legitimate power (CEO tenure) and formal power (CEO-TMT pay gap) has value as each of these power dimensions is found to impact the CEO gender-CSR relationship differently.

The purpose of this paper is to address the social meaning of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and improve understanding of this concept.

A free association task was completed by a sample of 275 individuals, mostly employees from different industries, who were given “socially responsible corporation” as the stimulus.

The results elicit three distinct views of a socially responsible corporation. Some individuals consider a socially responsible corporation to be one that undertakes its business operations in an efficient and ethical manner. Others see it as an organisation that takes an active role in contributing to the well being of society and behaves in an ecologically friendly way and acts in the field of social solidarity. For yet another set of participants a socially responsible corporation is one that adopts human resources practices that demonstrate respect and concern for the well being of employees and their families.

The social meaning of CSR includes ideas that to some extent mirror the conceptualisation introduced by previous theoretical models. However, this paper suggests that the translation of the theoretical models into instruments addressing stakeholders' perceptions of CSR requires closer scrutiny and validation through contextual (e.g. national) adaptations.

The paper contributes by providing additional knowledge on the social meaning of CSR in a European country, Portugal, and not only on Anglo‐Saxon countries, therefore, introducing specific situational challenges.