Do Board's Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy and Orientation Influence Environmental Sustainability Disclosure? UK Evidence

The environmental implications of corporate economic activities have led to growing demands for firms and their boards to adopt sustainable strategies and to disseminate more useful information about their activities and impacts on environment. This paper investigates the impact of board's corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy and orientation on the quantity and quality of environmental sustainability disclosure in UK listed firms. We find that effective board CSR strategy and CSR‐oriented directors have a positive and significant impact on the quality of environmental sustainability disclosure, but not on the quantity. Our findings also suggest that the existence of a CSR committee and issuance of a stand‐alone CSR report are positively and significantly related to environmental sustainability disclosure. When we distinguish between firms with high and low environmental risk, we find that the board CSR/sustainability practices that affect the quantity (quality) of environmental sustainability disclosure appear to be driven more by highly (lowly) environmentally sensitive firms. These results suggest that the board CSR/sustainability practices play an important role in ensuring a firm's legitimacy and accountability towards stakeholders. Our findings shed new light on this under‐researched area and could be of interest to companies, policy‐makers and other stakeholders. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The HR role in corporate social responsibility and sustainability: A boundary‐shifting literature review

Although research on human and social sustainability has flourished in the past decade, the role that human resource management departments play (or should play) in facilitating more socially responsible and sustainable organizations remains unclear. In practice, this lack of clarity is due to the multiple features and dimensions of potential HR contributions to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate sustainability (CS), as well as widespread failure to integrate HR and CSR functions. Theoretically, the absence of a framework that articulates the HR role in CSR and CS and the substantial separation between HRM and CSR/CS studies among academics act as a reinforcing mechanism. The present study contributes to the growing research on this topic, presenting a framework and a typology to classify the potential HR roles in CSR and CS and comprehensively reviewing the literature at the intersection of HR with CSR and CS. The results of the review provide a broader perspective on the role HR might play in CSR and CS as well as its impact beyond organizational boundaries.     

Assessing the impact of green supply chain practices on firm performance in the Korean manufacturing industry

As a growing number of customers tend to view corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a key purchase decision criterion, demands for CSR including environmental sustainability have accelerated in today's business world. To meet such demands, many firms consider embracing environment-friendly business practices. However, many firms are still hesitant to implement those practices due to sceptical views about their real managerial benefits. Although the previous literature confirms the positive link between a firm's commitment to environmental sustainability and its performance, the varying degree of impact of different kinds of environment-friendly supply chain practices on the firm's operational performance is still unknown. To fill the void left by prior research, this paper aims to classify various types of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices and then assess the impact of each of these distinct types on the firm's operational performances (especially manufacturing and marketing performance). Also, this paper examines how the firm's organisational profiles such as firm size affect the particular firm's choice of GSCM practices. Our experimental results reveal that the chosen type of GSCM practices influences the firm's performance differently.     

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Activities and Corporate Governance in Imperfectly Competitive Markets

We investigate the incentives of firms' owners to commit voluntarily to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in an oligopolistic market. The socially responsible attributes attached to products are considered as credence goods, with consumers forming expectations about their existence and level. We show that hiring an ‘individually’ socially responsible CEO and delegating to him the CSR effort and market decisions acts as a commitment device for the firm's owners and credibly signals to consumers that the firm will undertake the ‘missioned’ CSR activities. We also find that CSR activities are welfare enhancing for consumers and firms and thus, they should be encouraged. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Components of CEO Transformational Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility*

abstract We use transformational leadership theory to explore the role of CEOs in determining the extent to which their firms engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). We test this theory using data from 56 US and Canadian firms. CEO intellectual stimulation (but not CEO charismatic leadership) is found to be significantly associated with the propensity of the firm to engage in ‘strategic’ CSR, or those CSR activities that are most likely to be related to the firm's corporate and business‐level strategies. Thus, studies that ignore the role of leadership in CSR may yield imprecise conclusions regarding the antecedents and consequences of these activities. We also critique transformational leadership theory, in terms of its overemphasis on charismatic forms of leadership. This leads to a reconceptualization of transformational leadership, which emphasizes the intellectual stimulation component in the context of CSR.     

Promoting corporate social responsibility and sustainable development through management development: What can be learned from international service learning programs?

In this article, we discuss how the human resource development (HRD) function can support corporate sustainability strategy by designing and implementing leadership development programs incorporating international service learning assignments. We describe “Project Ulysses,” an integrated service learning program that involves sending participants in teams to developing countries to work in cross‐sector partnerships with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social entrepreneurs, supporting them in their fight against pressing global problems. We present the findings of a narrative analysis of learning stories produced by Ulysses participants. Understanding how participants make sense of, and learn from, their experiences abroad provides us with insights into how service learning programs can help managers to develop the knowledge, skills, and mind‐set that will enable them to successfully support a company's global sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. We conclude by discussing the implications for leadership development, specifically how organizations can incorporate a responsibility and sustainability focus in their management development programs.     

Playing on Two Chessboards: Reputation Effects between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Political Activity (CPA)

It has recently been argued that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is ‘political’. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure favourable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and corporate political activity (CPA) that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm's CSR and CPA – alignment, misalignment, and non‐alignment – affect the firm's reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.     

Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility to Internal Stakeholders: Walking the Walk or Just Talking the Talk?

As organizations recognize the need to engage in CSR and sustainability initiatives, it is integral to success to communicate that they are doing so. However, the research focus is more often on communicating with external stakeholders to draw attention to corporate responsibility initiatives. Internal stakeholders as employees are not researched as often, despite their integral role in communicating the organization's CSR vision and sustainability as they interact with external stakeholders. In order to explore employee perceptions of CSR communication, a two‐phase mixed‐method study was undertaken, including semi‐structured interviews with 20 CSR managers in NZ organizations to provide content to inform an online questionnaire survey to seek feedback from employees in these same organizations. This paper contributes to research on internal stakeholders in revealing the influence of the perceived value congruence between managers and employees in influencing internal stakeholder perceptions of CSR and sustainability initiatives. The findings have implications for public policy, enhancing organizational communication, the need for authenticity and managerial recognition of their role in facilitating employee commitment to CSR initiatives. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Corporate social responsibility,durable‐goods and firm profitability

Utilizing a two‐period durable‐goods framework, we show that in uncommitted sales markets a firm may earn higher profits as it increases its level of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We find that this occurs even though CSR has no direct impact other than increasing the durable‐goods firm's manufacturing costs. We show that in sales markets, CSR may allow the firm to credibly commit itself to lower production in the future. This, in turn, can enhance their profits even though the CSR activities are costly and provide no direct demand or marketing benefit in our model. This is important because it provides another, hereto unexplored, strategic rationale for the willingness of profit‐maximizing firms to undertake costly CSR activities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal Orientation and Corporate Social Responsibility: Global Evidence

There has been a growing emphasis on the importance of a long-term perspective in academia and practice. Yet understanding of the interdependency of those factors – the temporal preferences embedded in organizations and in societal values as well as the influence of temporal orientation of investors – remains limited. We theorize whether and how a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) is affected by the societal temporal orientation, its time horizon, and its investors' time horizon. Using a global sample, we confirm that CSR activity is higher when a country has a long-term orientation culture, when the firm has a long-time horizon, and when the controlling institutional investor has a long-term investment horizon. We also find that the national culture's long-term orientation heightens the effect of a firm's long-time horizon on its CSR. Further, our results show that the effects of temporal orientation are more pronounced in environmental than in social CSR.     

An analysis of environmental corporate social responsibility

This article investigates corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices while taking into account their product substitutability and environmental responsibility. CSR firms, integrating environmental and social concerns into its business operations, are introduced. The effects of the firms' social concerns, environmental responsibility, and product substitutability are all captured. First, firms' social concerns improve both outputs and CSR firms' objective function value, while reducing the profit maximization firm's profits. Second, environmental responsibility has the contrary effects. Both the outputs and the objective function values of both firms decrease with their product substitutability. Finally, social concern effects on CSR firms' performance are uncertain.     

Pathways of stakeholder influence in the Canadian forestry industry

We draw on the stakeholder influence literature to propose and empirically test hypotheses regarding the direct and indirect pathways of perceived influence that stakeholders exercise within the domain of corporate sustainability. Our results allow us to examine the interaction between different types of stakeholder pressure and different types of stakeholder influence strategy. We show that stakeholders who do not control resources critical to the focal firm's operations are able to pressure a firm indirectly via other stakeholders on whose resources the firm is dependent. We contribute to the stakeholder perspective by showing how stakeholders who are affected by the focal firm's operations can enhance their salience via stakeholders who can affect the firm. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Reputation and Corporate Social Responsibility Aberrations,Trends, and Hypocrisy: Reactions to Firm Choices in the Stock Option Backdating Scandal

Drawing on strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) and reputation theory, this paper examines the market reaction to firm disclosures of involvement in the US stock option backdating scandal. We examine how a firm's prior signals regarding ethical behaviour and values, as demonstrated through CSR initiatives, may both ameliorate and exacerbate market reactions. CSR initiatives may buffer a firm against general wrong‐doing but expose it to greater scrutiny and sanction for related wrong‐doing. Our results show that firms with enhanced overall reputations for CSR are partially buffered from scandal revelations. However, we find that when firms possess an enhanced reputation for CSR associated with corporate governance, violations pertaining specifically to governance are viewed as hypocritical and more harshly sanctioned. We also find lower and negative market reactions for firms that delay but self‐disclose their involvement in the scandal. The study extends the emergent, related literatures on strategic CSR and reputation management, and documents dynamics in the relationship between corporate social and financial performance.     

To what extent is corporate social responsibility part of human resource management in the Chinese context? A review of literature and future research directions

There has been considerable research attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in relation to human resource management (HRM) in the Chinese context in the last decade. This systematic review of extant literature of CSR–HRM in the Chinese context is thus undertaken with the aim of identifying what we know, what the gaps are in this field of research, and what their relevance is to theory and practice. It reveals a number of limitations in the emerging body of CSR–HRM research in the Chinese context. We call for more context-driven and interdisciplinary and multi-level research oriented to organizational problem-solving, to make our CSR–HRM studies more legitimate and relevant for businesses and societies. We also call for a more in-depth and refined approach to research design, in order to better understand organizational CSR–HRM practices, workplace environments, and related outcomes. Research on CSR–HRM in Chinese firms also needs to be situated in the international context with broader implications, because Chinese firms do not operate in isolation. Rather, they are governed, directly and indirectly, by international institutions and seek to influence global governance at the same time, with HRM implications. Finally, research on CSR–HRM in the Chinese context needs to be framed in a broader framework and to assess real-life issues and impacts.     

Corporate governance and lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender‐supportive human resource policies from corporate social responsibility,resource‐based,and agency perspectives

Corporate boards are responsible for ensuring that managers enact policies that are in shareholders' best interests, and managers are responsible for implementing strategies that are not only profitable but also responsive to changing legal and societal demands and the resource needs of the firm. In this paper, we use the theoretical lenses of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the resource‐based view, and agency theory to investigate the relationship between corporate governance structure and the implementation of supportive lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) policies. We analyze 10,233 firm‐year observations and 1,594 unique firms, and our results demonstrate that LGBT‐supportive policies are positively associated with firm performance. We also offer new insight into why not all firms adopt such policies. We exploit the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act as an exogenous shock that increased board independence, and our difference‐in‐difference estimation shows that firms forced to raise board independence in 2002 were less likely to invest in LGBT‐supportive policies. Results suggest that human resource management (HRM) policies can be guided by CSR and resource‐based views in the pursuit of wealth maximization, but agency conflict may also be a concern for external majority boards. We discuss implications for HRM research practice and corporate governance regarding LGBT policies in organizations.     

The role of HRM in developing sustainable organizations: Contemporary challenges and contradictions

Debates surrounding the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggest organizations need to pursue the objectives of a variety of stakeholders and human resource management (HRM), with its pluralist ideological underpinnings, is well-positioned to help in this endeavour. The dilemma for human resource (HR) practitioners is how best can engagement with the CSR agenda be achieved? This study addresses this question by drawing on data obtained through a systematic review of the literature (SRL). In doing so key roles undertaken by the HRM function as it works towards developing sustainable organizations are identified and the challenges that arise from the pursuit of divergent organizational goals are highlighted. This review concludes by first providing some sage advice to practitioners about how to navigate these contradictory objectives so that they can meaningfully impact on CSR efforts and second, by suggesting some directions for future research.     

How effective human resource management promotes corporate entrepreneurship: evidence from China

Strategic human resource management (SHRM) represents a set of HRM practices that are aligned with firm strategies. The relationship between SHRM and organizational performance has been extensively examined; however, whether and how SHRM influences corporate entrepreneurship remains unknown. Based on the resource-based perspective, this study examined a model linking SHRM with corporate entrepreneurship. The importance of HRM people's political skill for a firm's development of devolved management through SHRM implementation was also examined. Data from a survey of 201 Chinese manufacturing firms confirm a significant relationship between SHRM and corporate entrepreneurship and that the relationship is partially mediated by a devolved management style. The relationship between SHRM and devolved management was shown to be stronger for firms with more politically skillful HRM people.     

Recipes for Successful Sustainability: Empirical Organizational Configurations for Strong Corporate Environmental Performance

We examine 45 existing case studies of firms with strong corporate environmental performance (CEP) to empirically identify four organizational configurations for successful sustainability. These four configurations represent different combinations of variables describing a firm's external environment, organizational structure, and its strategy‐related activities. More specifically, these configurations vary in having a benign or challenging external environment, a mechanistic or organic structure, a low‐cost or differentiation strategy, hands‐on or hands‐off participation by the top management team, high or low consideration given to stakeholders, and a short‐ or long‐term time orientation. Taken together the four organizational configurations introduce an understanding of equifinality for achieving CEP. In other words, given an adequate variety of ingredients, there are multiple recipes for successful sustainability. Implications for scholars, practitioners and policy‐makers and other stakeholders are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Standardization or localization? Executing corporate philanthropy in international firms

• Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a key component of a firm's reputation. The reputational vulnerabilities and pressure for CSR are perhaps greatest among international firms with business activities across many countries and cultures. Although the strategies of firms entering new markets have been well researched, the CSR component of the market entry decision has been largely ignored, despite its significant relationship with the financial performance of the firm. Further, previous research has largely considered CSR from an environmental performance point of view, and thus has focused on a minimum level of investment in CSR as opposed to the optimal form of the investment. Our paper seeks to address this gap by examining market entry decisions as they relate to corporate philanthropy.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

HRM institutional entrepreneurship for sustainable business organizations

As businesses experience greater pressures from a variety of stakeholders concerned with promoting a balanced approach to managing the competing demands for increased profitability, improved social conditions, and restoring the health of planet earth, new opportunities arise for HRM scholars and professionals to contribute to the pursuit of sustainability. However, the foundational logic of sustainability diverges significantly from the dominant perspective in today's business environment. Building upon the institutional theory literature, we introduce the concept of HRM institutional entrepreneurship to examine the paradoxes and emerging opportunities associated with the urgent need for more sustainable approaches for managing business organizations. As a guide to future work, we describe how the actions of HRM scholars and professionals can stimulate evolution from an HRM philosophy that relies on financial indicators to assess effectiveness towards an HRM philosophy that promotes a tripartite approach to sustainability, showing equal concern for economic, environmental and social performance. Focusing on organizational changes that improve environmental performance, we apply the concept of HRM institutional entrepreneurship to consider ways for HRM professionals to engage internal and external stakeholders in order to create value in organizations pursuing sustainability. Ultimately, activities that constitute HRM institutional entrepreneurship for sustainable business drive the development of capabilities that characterize ambidextrous organizations.