Search results

This study aims to examine the extended effects of corporate (ir)responsibilities in supply chains. More specifically, the authors compare the impact of social and environmental initiatives and failures in the reputational capital of supply chain partners. The authors investigate how (and if) companies’ decisions to prioritize different sustainability dimensions in their supplier selection processes (i.e. sustainability trade-offs) affect consumers’ perception of corporate image, corporate credibility-expertise, attitude towards the firm and word-of-mouth.

The authors conducted three behavioural vignette-based experiments with 562 participants from the USA, relying on analysis of variance and t-tests analyses.

Results show that consumers perceive social irresponsibility cases as more severe than environmental ones in suppliers’ operations, penalizing buyers’ corporate image, corporate credibility-expertise and word-of-mouth. Corporate image, attitude towards the firm and word-of-mouth also have significant differences between social and environmental trade-offs. Statistically significant differences were also found between scenarios that portrayed the discovery of an irresponsible action and ones that reinforced the previous irresponsible practice in companies’ suppliers.

When types of irresponsibility practices are presented, the discovery of child labour and modern slavery conditions in suppliers damage how consumers perceive the company on corporate image and their attitude towards the organization and how they will spread word-of-mouth, reinforcing the importance of considering sustainability issues when making supplier selection decisions.

The study contributes to the understanding of how companies are perceived by their consumers regarding irresponsible practices and their impact on firms’ supplier selection decisions. Furthermore, data suggests that consumers might hierarchize sustainability dimensions, perceiving social irresponsibility cases as more severe than environmental irresponsibility ones.

Drawing on expectancy violation theory, this study aims to assess the impact of corporate environmental irresponsibility (CEI) on workplace deviant behaviors (WDB) of Generation Z and Millennials through the mediation of moral outrage.

The data were collected from 328 nonmanagerial employees working in the refinery, petroleum and power distribution companies who have been convicted for committing environmental irresponsibility by a court of law. Multigroup analysis (MGA) was used to estimate the hypothesized relationships.

Results revealed that CEI affects WDBs positively. Moreover, the MGA results demonstrated that the deviant behavior of Generation Z in response to environmental irresponsibility is higher than of the Millennials.

Theoretically, the findings implicate that harming the environment will cost organizational performance through deviant behaviors.

This study provides a new lens for the executive management that eliminating social irresponsibility is more important than incurring sustainability initiatives, especially from the new generation’s perspective.

The originality of this study is that it confirmed the impact of CEI on employees’ deviant behaviors; and extended the scope of expectancy violation theory to the field of human resources.

In weaker institutions, lack of corporate social responsibility (CSR) constituencies causes organizations to naturally incline toward corporate socially irresponsible actions. Grounded in the institutional theory, this paper aims to explore the nature of corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) in the weaker institution and its effect on legitimacy and reputation. The presence of corporate ability moderates the impact of CSIR on legitimacy and reputation.

A list of manager’s contact information was generated from an online database. In total, 1,500 employees in 560 Pakistani organizations received the self-reported survey. In total, 203 managers working in 110 Pakistani organizations responded with the completed questionnaire that provided empirical support to the hypotheses.

Institutional drivers were positively significant to CSIR and negatively associated with the manager’s CSR attitudes. CSIR was negatively significant to legitimacy and reputation. Group differences between high and low corporate ability indicated that corporate ability played a vital role between CSIR and reputation.

These results have important implications for leaders, business-to-business and human resource (HR) managers in weaker institutions highlighting that organization’s supply chain partners consider adopting CSR practices. This can help the organization avoid undesirable and detrimental impact on its legitimacy and reputation, which are linked to irresponsible behaviors. HR managers should build CSR cognition in employees to bring effective change in the organization.

Lack of investigation into corporate ability and CSIR has raised questions about the organization’s efforts in the weaker institution that are sensitive to institutionalized corruption. This research adds to the literature by exploring how the organizations develop legitimacy and reputation while still acting irresponsibly in a weaker institution, presenting a paradox.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the sustainability disclosure methods‐instruments practiced by the two most widely employed indexes/instruments (DJSI World and GRI‐G3 Guidelines). The paper suggests that the newly created triple bottom line (TBL) reporting practices need to undergo further standardization and enforcement to avoid, or give early warnings about, future corporate mismanagement that leads to socio‐economic consequences detrimental to investors and consumers in general.

This paper utilizes sample firms from the DJSI World Index and the GRI‐G3 Sustainability Guidelines membership list to draw inferences on sustainability indicators of performance. The authors compare the GRI reporting guidelines with the disclosure indicators of the DJSI World.

The authors' findings suggest that TBL reporting has made enormous progress over the last two decades. However, the two widely used sustainability reporting instruments/indexes (DJSI World and GRI‐G3 Guidelines) differ in disclosure practice‐methods and the authors recommend that further standardization and enforcement is necessary. The authors' view is that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) should become actively involved with the issue of standardization and enforcement of corporate socio‐environmental disclosures. The paper presents evidence that investors have neither rewarded nor penalized firms for adhering to or violating sustainability matters in their corporate decisions.

The authors argue for further standardization and enforcement with regard to the disclosure methods of the two widely used (GRI and DJSI) sustainability indicators in order to avoid future corporate mismanagement that leads to (systemic) economic and socio‐environmental consequences detrimental to citizen investors and consumers in general.

The research is of interest to academicians and practitioners who are interested in the theory and practice of sustainability reporting or TBL reporting. The findings suggest that this newly created disclosure instrument needs to undergo further standardization and enforcement for meaningful and accurate disclosure of economic‐social and environmental performance. The authors' view is that the SEC and FASB should become actively involved with the issue of standardization and enforcement of socio‐environmental disclosure of corporate sustainability.

The study investigates the interaction of sustainability dimensions in supply chains. Along with the analysis of sustainability trade-offs (i.e. prioritizing one dimension to the sacrifice of others), we develop and test the concept of cross-insurance mechanism (i.e. meeting of one sustainability goal possibly attenuating the effects of poor performance in another).

Through the analysis of a 20-variation vignette-based experiment, we evaluate the effects of these issues on the corporate credibility (expertise and trustworthiness) of four tiers of a typical food supply chain: pesticide producers, farmers, companies from the food industry and retail chains.

Results suggest that both sustainability trade-offs and cross-insurance mechanisms have different impacts across the chain. While pesticide producers (first tier) and retail chains (fourth tier) seem to respond better to a social trade-off, the social cross-insurance mechanism has shown to be particularly beneficial to companies from the food industry (third tier). Farmers (second tier), in turn, seem to be more sensitive to the economic cross-insurance mechanism.

Along with adding to the study of sustainability trade-offs in supply chain contexts, results suggest that the efficiency of the insurance mechanism is not conditional on the alignment among sustainability dimensions (i.e. social responsibility attenuating social irresponsibility). In this sense, empirical evidences support the development of the cross-insurance mechanism as an original concept.

Overall, the purpose of this paper is to define and delineate the meaning of the concept of Organizational Incivility (OI) by examining its features, scope and implications. Furthermore, it depicts a set of research propositions aiming to guide future research.

Toward this end, this paper draws upon the literature of workplace incivility, unethical behavior, organizational dark side behavior and corporate social irresponsibility, which have been examined through distinct theoretical streams and frames them under the lens of OI concept. The ensuing analysis focuses on some well-known business-cases and their tragic consequences. In doing so, it also argues that the OI concept provides a solid theoretically based framework about how uncivil mindset have been specifically shaped at the organizational level.

Overall, it is proposed that OI is a by-product of conscious (bad) decisions in which the organizational leaderships are allured, at some point and for distinct reasons, to embrace moral disengagement and unethical choices. In doing so, the organizations overlook or neglect their commitments to society’s well-being and environmental preservation. As a result, the organizations start to play a dirty game without any sense of respect for those that rely on them (i.e. consumers and citizens).

The implementation of strict ethical codes and governance measures have proved not to be enough to contain the OI practices. In this regard, organizational leaderships should question themselves if their companies are truly aligned with a civilized conduct. In turn, government agencies, federal laws and institutions dedicated to preserve people’s well-being should play a more incisive role by identifying and stifling the organizational dark side.

On the face of it, it is argued that a myriad of demonstrations of organizational dark side that are identified worldwide can be theoretically explored through the lens of OI and therein lies the major contribution of this work. More specifically, it demonstrates that incivility can go, in fact, beyond organization frontiers spilling over the stakeholders in a negative manner and damaging the interactions. Further, it also contributes to theory by suggesting that OI is a process carefully designed by the organizational leaderships to achieve obscure goals and/or darker purposes.

This study examines how potentially irresponsible banking operations affect organisational reputation. A moderated mediation model is applied to explain how major aspects of social irresponsibility affect the relationship between consumer awareness of allegedly irresponsible operations, blame and bank reputation. The empirical context is the Swiss franc mortgage crisis that affected the banking industry in most Central and Eastern European countries.

The research study uses data collected from a large survey (N = 1,000) conducted among Polish bank consumers, including those with mortgage loans in Swiss francs. To test the proposed model, the authors use Hayes' process macro.

The findings show that blame fully mediates the effects of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) awareness on organisational reputation. Three facets of social irresponsibility moderate this relationship. Specifically, the perceived harm and intentionality of corporate culprits cause people to be more likely to blame a bank for the difficulties posed by indebted consumers. At the same time, the perceived complicity of consumers in misselling a mortgage reduces the level of blame and its subsequent adverse effects on bank reputation.

Although a strong reputation is crucial in the financial industry, few studies have attempted to address reputational risk from a consumer perspective. This study helps to understand how potentially irresponsible selling of a financial product can adversely affect a bank's reputation.

This study aims to investigate the effects of both internal and external corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) on organizational workplace deviant behaviours (OWDB) by using social cognitive theory. The study also explores the role of moral disengagement as a mediator in this relationship.

Data was collected from a sample of 321 individuals employed in the textile industry of Pakistan. The study used partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to estimate the relationships within the model.

The findings indicate that both internal and external CSI have a positive impact on moral disengagement. Secondly, moral disengagement drives OWDB positively. Thirdly, moral disengagement is a significant mediator that mediates between both internal and external CSI and OWDB positively.

This research offers novel perspectives to organizational leaders, highlighting the significance of addressing CSI in conjunction with sustainability endeavours. It is imperative for business managers to prioritize the morality of their employees.

This study’s novelty lies in its confirmation of the mediating role of moral disengagement in the relationship between internal and external CSI and OWDB.

When a company practices greenwashing, it violates consumers' expectations by deliberately deceiving them about their environmental practices or the benefits of their products/services. This study investigated the effects of greenwashing on corporate reputation and brand hate. Furthermore, this study explored the mediating effects of perceived environmental performance and green perceived risk.

A survey design using cross-sectional primary data from 420 Portuguese consumers who identified and recognized brands engaged in greenwashing was employed. The proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling techniques.

This study's findings show that consumer perceptions of greenwashing may damage brands. The results show that greenwashing has a negative effect on corporate reputation through perceived environmental performance and green perceived risk. Additionally, greenwashing has a positive direct effect on brand hate and a negative effect on green perceived risk. Therefore, reducing greenwashing practices can improve consumers' perceptions of corporate environmental performance, buffer green perceived risk, and ultimately enhance corporate reputation. This can lead to positive relationships with customers.

Based on signaling and expectancy violation theories, this study develops a new framework highlighting the detrimental effects of greenwashing on brands. The combination of these theories provides the right framework to understand how greenwashing may lead to extreme feelings like brand hate and negative perceptions of corporate reputation, thus advancing the current research that lacks studies on the association between these constructs.

This study aims to investigate the complex relationship between corporate–nonprofit partnership characteristics (type, duration and source of communication); attitude toward the corporation (pretest and posttest); partnership evaluation; and stakeholders' willingness to engage in anti-corporate behaviors when a corporation behaves irresponsibly and negatively impacts an individual's community. The three partnership characteristics are evaluated, individually and collectively, to discern which, if any, characteristics protect or buffer a corporation from stakeholders' engagement in negative communication behaviors when controlling for how stakeholders evaluate the partnership and the corporation.

The study used an online experiment with 970 participants who were randomly assigned to a 2 × 2 × 3 × 2 factorial design.

Contrary to some previous research findings, this study found that individuals who evaluate either the corporation or the partnership favorably are more likely to engage in anti-corporate behaviors. Neither the partnership type nor communication source provides a buffering effect. The only partnership characteristic to generate a buffering effect was duration and that only occurred if the partnership lasted three years. This study concludes that when corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) co-occur, an amplification rather than mollifies stakeholders' willingness to enact anti-corporate communication behaviors in instances of CSI.

This study advances scholarly understanding of CSR and CSI as in-tandem concepts and practices. The findings challenge previous claims that corporate–nonprofit partnerships can buffer corporations from negative events. In contrast, we find that partnerships are limited in their ability to reduce stakeholders' willingness to engage in anti-corporate behaviors in instances of CSR. It also answers calls that CSR research should use non-fictitious companies to increase ecological validity of the study design.