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This study aims to investigate the influence of external factors identified by the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal (PESTEL) framework on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in Vietnamese construction firms.

The snowball sampling method was employed to gather 182 validated responses. Employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the research analyzed how these factors correlate with CSR practices under institutional theory.

Results indicated that social, economic, environmental, legal and technological factors positively impacted CSR performance. Among these, social factors had the most significant effect, followed sequentially by economic, environmental, legal and technological influences. Intriguingly, political factors demonstrated no significant association with CSR performance.

The strong impact of social factors confirms that societal norms and cultural values are critical in shaping corporate behavior in Vietnam. Firms can leverage this insight by intensifying their community engagement and social investment. Additionally, the negligible role of political factors in shaping CSR suggests that firms might not need to focus heavily on political engagement in Vietnam. However, firms should remain aware of legal changes as legal factors influence CSR outcomes.

Despite CSR’s growing importance, there remains a notable research gap regarding how external macro-environmental factors influence CSR performance, particularly within the construction industry. The findings emphasize the importance of aligning business strategies with socioeconomic and environmental aspects.

With the rapid rise in the number of start-ups, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can principally contribute to the nation’s socioeconomic development, making it more critical. This study aims to explore the effect of sustainability practices on a firm’s performance with competitive advantage (CA) and innovation (INN) as the mediating variable.

An exhaustive literature review was done to identify the constructs relationship for this study, and a questionnaire was used to gather the data from the start-up owners. In total, 400 samples were received, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was used for testing and validating the proposed hypotheses.

CSR and financial performance (FP) have a significant relationship. According to this study’s findings, innovation and CA substantially mediate the relationship between a firm’s FP and CSR. This study will highlight how CSR practices stimulate organizational creativity, problem-solving and strategic thinking. It will also demonstrate how CSR can foster a culture of innovation that generates long-term value and positively impacts FP.

It will aid in improving the knowledge of start-up owners that CSR is more than just pure altruism or philanthropy; instead, it must be promoted strategically as an investment that boosts productivity and creativity while also bringing overall financial benefits to the company. It will ultimately enhance the start-ups’ ability to improve the economy and society. Furthermore, this study holds the potential to inform policy discussions and recommendations for fostering responsible business practices in the Indian start-up ecosystem. Policymakers can benefit from insights into how regulations and incentives can be designed to encourage start-ups to adopt CSR practices that not only fulfill legal obligations but also contribute to their CA and FP.

This study provides empirical validity to establish linkages between sustainability measures on the FP concerning start-ups that were not considered in the prior studies. Identifying the current conceptual framework and CA and Innovation as the two major factors influencing CSR in Indian enterprises is a novel contribution. This study aims to fill the research gap. By unravelling the intricate dynamics between CSR, FP and CA, the research contributes to the understanding of how start-ups can navigate the complex interplay of social responsibility and business success in the Indian context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the workforce environment and corporate social responsibility (CSR) audit report lag while also developing a comprehensive understanding of the moderating effect of media coverage on this relationship.

This paper was based on a sample of 151 French nonfinancial companies listed on the CAC All Shares index and covered an eight-year period, from 2014 to 2021. To test the hypotheses, a feasible generalized least squares regression was applied. Moreover, the authors checked the results using an additional analysis and the generalized method of moment model for endogeneity problems.

Based on a panel data set comprising 960 observations of French firms from the period 2014 to 2021, the results obtained indicate a significant negative relationship between the workforce environment and CSR audit report lag. Additionally, it was found that media exposure moderates the relationship between the workforce environment and CSR audit report lag.

This study contributes to the existing research on workforce environment and CSR audit report lag, potentially providing stakeholders such as employees, employers, regulators and auditors with an environment that shortens the time for issuing CSR audit reports. The findings are also relevant for foreign institutional investors aiming to enhance their investment decisions with more comprehensive information.

The work is innovative as it explores the moderating impact of media exposure on the connection between workforce environment and CSR audit report lag, a topic not extensively studied before. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior empirical studies have examined this relationship within the French context or elsewhere.

This study investigates the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial performance of the banking sector from the prospective of emerging countries.

This study obtained balance sheet and income statement data for 173 banks in 20 emerging countries from the Bankscope database from 2005–2018. The CSR-related data were taken from the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 database. Moreover, macroeconomic controls such as GDP per capita, inflation, and financial development are attained from the GFDD. The series of institutional quality indices (Political Stability, Rule of Law, Control of Corruption, Government Effectiveness, and Regulatory Quality) is obtained from the WGI. At the same time, national culture and bank regulation are attained from Hofstede Insights and Barth et al. (2013). We used the panel fixed-effects model in our baseline estimations, while 2SLS and GMM were applied to control for endogeneity.

The finding shows that CSR activities significantly improve bank performance, but the effect varies across the bank. Only environmentally friendly activities have shown a significant positive relationship with banking performance for CSR dimensions. However, the social and government dimensions did not significantly affect bank performance. Moreover, a sound institutional and regulatory environment and national norms play an important role in the nexus of CSR activities and bank performance.

This study provides empirical evidence that sheds light on CSR and bank performance in an emerging market context.

Considering the significance of the human resource management (HRM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) relationship, the aim of this research is twofold: first is to measure the cultural differences between HRM, CSR and sustainable performance relationship (study 1) and second is to identify the how HRM instigates CSR and sustainable performance (study 2) in the hospitality industry of UK and Pakistan.

A mixed-method approach was used to collect the qualitative and quantitative data from upscale hotels. In Study 1, a multi-respondent and time-lagged strategy was employed to collect the data from 162 Pakistani and 290 UK upscale hotels. In Study 2, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand the HRM–CSR–performance nexus.

The results of Study 1 highlight the significant cultural differences in the relationships of HRM–CSR–performance, while Study 2 explains that ethical culture, shared objectives, transparency, training and development, and economic incentives are the factors that push the employees to take part in CSR-related activities and attaining higher sustainable performance.

This study addresses the debate on the difference between cross-cultural studies related to implementing Western theories in shaping, developing and implementing business strategies, including CSR, HRM and sustainable performance in an Asian context.

This study aims to examine whether social initiatives adopted by firms lead to improved financial performance. The authors analyse the impact of different elements of social initiatives on wealth creation for firms in terms of operating and market performance.

The study is based on the social initiative scores of over 4,500 firms collected from Thomson Reuters' ESG database. The study uses two-stage least squares (2SLS) to analyse the relationship between social initiatives and firm performance.

Profitable, mature, capital intensive and firms with high sales growth rate tend to invest more in social initiatives. Firms with high agency costs invest in social initiatives for workforce efficiency, maintaining human rights and product responsibility. The study documents evidence that social investments are value creating mechanism for firms which leads to improved financial performance in terms of operating and stock market performance. Firms with high dividend intensity invest in social initiatives for workforce welfare and human rights initiatives. Investment in employee well-being and community initiatives results in intangible benefits such as improved stock market valuation.

The research model has not considered the impact of intervening variables to understand the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance.

Firms ought to recognize that social investment is beneficial in terms of value creation of firms as stock market perceive such investments favourably. Firms must focus more on community development initiatives and workforce initiatives for the value creation of firms compared to investments directed towards human rights initiatives and product responsibility initiatives.

This study focusses exclusively on the social dimension of the CSR activities. The authors examine the impact of social welfare scores on firm performance by analysing the valuation effects on scores representing workforce, human rights, community and product responsibility. Moreover, the paper also examines the impact of a new dimension of product responsibility on firm performance. They also focus on both aspects of financial performance in terms of operating performance (proxied by ROE) and the joint impact of both operating and market performance (proxied by Tobin’s Q). This paper contributes to the research on the linkage of social performance to financial performance by observing that firms with high agency cost characteristics tend to invest in social initiatives for work force efficiency, maintaining human rights and product responsibility.

This paper aims to explore how lean manufacturing practices (LMPs) predict sustainable performance (SP) in the context of manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in less developed countries, like Yemen. In particular, it investigates the mediating effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) under different levels of competitive intensity (CI).

Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze data gathered from a survey of 259 Yemeni manufacturing SMEs.

The findings confirm that LMPs affect CSR, which in turn affects SP. This study also confirms that LMPs have a positive indirect effect on SP through CSR, which diminished in the presence of CI.

This study provides useful insights for policymakers and firms’ managers, who are anticipated to show a higher commitment to CSR in their firms when adopting LMPs to enhance their firms’ SP, especially under a low level of CI.

This paper contributes to expanding knowledge on the effect of LMPs on SP through CSR constrained by the level of CI.

This research aims to explore the perceived usefulness of audited social information in making economic decisions, in the eyes of both Tunisian financial analysts and bankers.

The authors conduct an exploratory qualitative study using twelve semi-structured interviews: seven are carried out with financial analysts, and five are performed among bankers.

This study’s results reveal that financial analysts and bankers paid little attention to the audited social information in making investment/credit granting decisions. The authors also show that the low perceived usefulness of social audit is due to many reasons related to political, economic, regulatory, educational, cultural and cognitive factors.

This study contributes to the current literature in several ways. First, it enriches the knowledge about the perceived usefulness of social audit. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the perception of financial analysts and bankers to audited social information and its usefulness for decision-making. Second, the focus on the Tunisian context is interesting as it was marked, since the outbreak of the Jasmine Revolution, by the uncertainty and the instability of political, economic and social conditions. Third, this research goes further by exploring the most important factors affecting the perceiveness of social auditing.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained tremendous importance after several corporate scandals, financial crises and the rise of the hyper-competitive world. Firms must address multiple stakeholders’ interests to increase firm value. This study aims to investigate the effect of CSR on firm value. This study also examines the mediating role of enterprise risk management (ERM) and the moderating influence of corporate governance (CG) in this CSR-firm value relationship.

The sample of the study comprises 119 Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) listed firms and the study covers the period from 2010 to 2021. The corporate social responsibility performance has been quantified across five dimensions. These aspects are product, environment, employee relations, diversity and community. Four proxies i.e. strategy, operation, reporting and compliance, have been used to measure ERM. The governance quality of the sample companies was evaluated using the governance index, which included 29 governance provisions. The authors used the dynamic panel data technique (system-GMM) is used to achieve the objectives of the study. Furthermore, a firm’s engagement in CSR activities can also be measured through a multinational financial approach to check the robustness of the result.

Based on the regression analysis, the authors discovered that CSR was positively connected with firm value, validating the stakeholder view of CSR. Furthermore, following Baron and Kenny’s (1986) mediation technique, the findings confirm that ERM mediates this association. These results are robust by using the bootstrapping tests by Preacher and Hayes (2004). Furthermore, the result shows that corporate governance (CG) is positively connected with firm performance, and this relationship is strengthened in the presence of an effective governance system in the organization.

This study provides useful insights to regulators, investors and policymakers to consider CSR as a value-enhancing factor and encourage the development of enterprise risk management and compliance with CG mechanisms to improve firm value.

The presented analysis strengthens the existing CSR–firm value relationship by analyzing the mediating and moderating roles of ERM and CG, which have not yet been tested, particularly in the context of Pakistan.

While existing research in organizational behavior has explored such constructs as perceived social impact and extra-role behaviors, there remains a limited understanding of how employees can make positive changes inside and outside the organization within their professional roles. This study aims to bridge the existing research gap by introducing a novel construct, Employee Social Impact Behavior (ESIB), alongside developing and validating a corresponding scale, the Employee Social Impact Behavior Scale (ESIBS), to measure employees' contributions both within their organizations and toward broader societal welfare.

The authors used Hinkin’s (1998) psychometric methodology to develop and validate the ESIBS. The process encompassed initial item generation, item reduction with reliability estimation, confirmatory factor analysis and convergent and discriminant validity examination. The authors used data from diverse samples to find that the ESIBS had a consistent unidimensional structure.

The scale exhibits both convergent and discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity is demonstrated through the scale’s relation with related constructs such as perceived social impact and extra-role behaviors. Overall, the ESIB is found to be a reliable and valid measure.

This study unveils a validated ESIB construct, serving both researchers and practitioners to assess impactful employee behaviors within organizations and toward society. This marks a pivotal enhancement in measuring contributions that extend beyond traditional organizational roles to broader societal change.