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Rather recently, corporate volunteering (CV) has become a relevant topic of academic research. Nonetheless, there is still uncertainty about several aspects of the relationship between volunteerism and the corporate realm and research on the relationship between CV and employer attractiveness is scarce. This study aims to attempt to fill this gap by studying the influence that the perceived importance attributed by prospective applicants to the opportunity of engaging in CV programs may have on employer attractiveness while also pondering the existence of an indirect relationship between CV and employer attractiveness mediated by the individual cognition of corporate morality (CM).

To fulfill the objectives of this research, and test its hypothesized model, the authors opted to use a quantitative methodology via survey by questionnaire of Portuguese students who are close to entering the job-seeking process or are currently involved in it, either passively and actively. Data on 238 Portuguese students was collected mainly through social media channels such as LinkedIn and Facebook and was analyzed with the IBM SPSS Statistics 25 software and the IBM SPSS AMOS extension, using a structural equation model to test the hypotheses and obtain insight into the relationships between the variables.

A theoretical model was elaborated based on the literature reviewed and was used to validate the existence of a positive direct relationship between CV and employer attractiveness, CV and CM and between CM and employer attractiveness. Finally, it was observed that CV could prompt an indirect effect on the socioethical perception of employer attractiveness, mainly due to the mediating mechanism of the individual cognition of CM.

This study has some limitations that should be acknowledged and considered in future studies, namely, the diversity of the sample, as it was essentially formed by students enrolled in the University of Porto and studying mainly in the areas of social sciences, trade and law. It is also worth noting that a global analysis of the employer attractiveness attributes was not considered, focusing instead on the social and ethical spectrum of employer attractiveness. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that different individuals prioritize distinct attractiveness attributes.

Through the present study, it was understood that CV programs constitute a desired and pertinent tool that should be adopted by firms (employers) to establish a strong position in the job market. These findings are particularly useful for the area of human resources management, which is in charge of finding the most adequate applicants in the job market. Furthermore, for the variable of CM, the authors noticed that there is a theoretical lack of measurement instruments. Consequently, the measure advanced in this study represents an important theoretical and methodologic contribution to the literature.

CV is a concept that is yet maturing within the Portuguese business environment. As such, this study delivers useful insights regarding Portuguese applicants’ growing interest around CV, their concerns about the social, ethical and humanitarian attributes of firms and their beliefs regarding the morality of firms’ social policies and actions. Hence, it allowed us to comprehend that by developing a structured CV program, an employer may be able to enhance other essential concepts for Portuguese prospective applicants, respectively, employer attractiveness and CM.

This study corroborates the premise that corporate community involvement activities, namely, CV, hold a positive effect in terms of perceived employer attractiveness. Moreover, it is consistent with the idea that CV programs foment a feeling of intimacy between individuals and firms, consequently creating a perception of morality as part of the firms’ intrinsic traits. Finally, it corroborates and extends for the case of prospective applicants the conclusion that individuals may be relatively more concerned with the motives behind firms’ corporate social responsibility practices than with the content of such practices.

The modern social and political order is characterised by a range of disparate moralities which lead to a plethora of interpretations and competing perspectives as to what ought to be the appropriate ethical template for corporate social responsibility. The possibility of uniting these disparate threads into a unified whole is explored by addressing the complex philosophies of Immanuel Kant and his alleged successor, Hans Kelsen; paying particular attention to their contrasting views of the proper foundations of public consensus towards establishing an idealised moral community of corporate actors.

The research is library-based and suggests that philosophy (in this instance, Kant’s moral philosophy and Kelsen’s general theory of law and state, for example) is able to offer an alternative rational and morally grounded ethics of law and governance; pertinent to the effective governance of corporate behaviour and moral management practices.

Central concepts, characteristic of both the Kantian and Kelsenian philosophical methodologies, have the capacity to act as a positive influence on the development of effective CSR mechanisms for assuring greater accountability. In addition, it is suggested that by prescribing ethically appropriate corporate behaviour as a first consideration, such philosophical frameworks are capable of providing a powerful disincentive against corporate crime.

The paper is interdisciplinary and (in an era of mistrust, global financial impropriety and other corporate misdemeanours) explores the utility of a philosophical approach towards articulating the conditions for imposing a moral duty incumbent upon all corporate actors in addressing the practical and conceptual needs of their shareholders and wider society.

In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

Morality is primarily a system of values, meanings, convictions, beliefs, principles, and drivers of good behavior and good outcomes in any organization. Using systems thinking concepts and applications introduced and developed during the last 50 years or so by various scholars from MIT, Stanford, and Wharton, such as Chris Argyris, Russell Ackoff, G. K. Forrester, Peter Senge, Stephen Covey, and Jim Collins, this chapter seeks to explore various past and contemporary market systems and challenges in terms of specific inputs, processes, and outputs. Systems thinking reckons everything in the cosmos (usually classified as subjects, objects, properties, and events) as a system (composed of two or more interactive parts with individual and interactive effects) that is connected to every other system in the universe. Various systems thinking laws and archetypes that have been developed thus far by systems thinkers will be introduced in order to identify basic patterns, structures, and constraints of human thinking and reasoning that create market phenomena. The academic and managerial challenge is to identify, explore, and capitalize such nonobvious connections for creating and developing new markets and corporate growth opportunities in the highly turbulent markets of today. In a globalized, digitized, and networked planet and universe, systems thinking is a very effective tool for analyzing turbulent market systems holistically and in an inclusive and integrated manner, with their specific inputs, processes, and outcomes. Several contemporary market cases will be included to illustrate the contents of this chapter.

Recently in this Journal, Cutting and Kouzmin postulated a three‐phase group decision‐making process. This paper demarcates, within that framework, a set of contending corporate board decision‐making perceptions. It’s premise is that how directors determine how investigations should be conducted, evidence should be assessed, and the truth should be decided depends on their epistemological and ontological predisposition. The philosophy of the social sciences offers four contending epistemological and ontological lens used to describe, analyze, evaluate and judge their corporate world. Each is fundamentally flawed. What is needed, then, are reflexive and pluralized corporate governance structures and processes that can accommodate a variety of epistemological and ontological imperatives. The broad conclusion drawn is that good corporate governance requires directors to recognize the limitations of their understanding of corporate governance reality, to treat all truth claims skeptically, and never to resort to self‐deception or self‐delusion just to avoid unpleasant corporate governance truths.

Educating audiences towards positive transformational change and targeted towards the improvement of quality of life in the field of strategic communication is almost a fairy tale. The controversy surrounding the Croatian pension fund system and its reform, low pensions, the negative demographic trends and low levels of financial and retirement literacy has put pension funds in a constant position of dealing with crisis communication strategies. At the same time, strategic communication in the industry is very traditional and is usually unnoticed. Taking a step back from a traditional goal of customer acquisitions, Croatian pension funds have pooled their efforts within the Association of Pension Funds and Pension Fund Insurance Companies in order to act as a unified group when dealing with joint interest. Recognizing the need of society to raise awareness of personal engagement in the process of retirement savings, they have decided to use education as a tool of strategic communication. This chapter has the purpose of showing how purposeful content-based valuable information can be created with the aim of influencing attitudes and behaviours in the field of personal and pension savings. During the project a quantitative study was conducted in order to investigate the effectiveness of the education on the attitudes and knowledge related to pension fund savings. The results of the quasi experiment indicate that the education has increased respondents' knowledge and positive attitudes towards retirement savings.

This chapter covers basic concepts, ethical theories, and moral paradigms of corporate ethics for identifying, understanding, and responding to the turbulent market challenges of today. The concept, nature, and domain of ethics, business ethics, managerial ethics, and corporate executive ethics are defined and differentiated for their significance. The domain, scope, and nature of related concepts such as legality, ethicality, morality, and executive spirituality are distinguished and developed. Among normative and descriptive ethical theories that we briefly review and critique here are teleology or utilitarianism, deontology or existentialism, distributive justice, corrective justice, and ethics of malfeasance and beneficence. Other moral theories of ethics such as ethics of human dignity, ethics of cardinal virtues, ethics of trusting relations, ethics of stakeholder rights and duties, ethics of moral reasoning and judgment calls, ethics of executive and moral leadership, and ethics of social and moral responsibility will be treated in a later book. The thrust of this book is positive: despite our not very commendable track record in managing this planet and its resources, our basic questions are: Where are we now? What are we now? Where should we as corporations go, and why? What are the specific positive mandates and metrics to corporate executives to reach that desired destiny? This chapter explores responses to these strategic corporate questions.

From an internal perspective, the purpose of this study is to understand employees' responses to chief executive officer (CEO) activism, a phenomenon wherein a company's CEO expresses his/her own opinions and ideas on controversial sociopolitical issues. Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR), public relations and leadership literature, this study examines the effects of employees' expectations toward CEOs and transformational CEO leadership on the perceived morality of CEO activism and its attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

An online survey was conducted with 417 full-time employees in the US whose CEO has been engaging in sociopolitical issues.

The results showed that employees' ethical expectations toward their CEOs and transformational CEO leadership were positively associated with perceived morality of CEO activism, whereas economic expectations toward CEOs had no significant relationship with it. In turn, perceived morality of CEO activism contributed to employees' positive attitudes and supportive behaviors for their CEOs and their companies.

This study is among the first attempts to examine the effectiveness of CEO activism from an internal perspective, drawing from CSR, public relations and leadership literature.